Order, Religion, and Nation

Writing in 1672 in the preface to the English translation of Pierre Cheva­lier’s A Discourse of the Original, Countrey, Manners, Government and Reli­gion of the Cossacks, the publisher of the book, Edward Brown, counted the Ukrainian Cossacks among the contemporary nations and even com­pared them with Englishmen.

Although Ukraine be one of the most remote Regions of Europe, and the Cossackian name very Modern; yet hath that Countrey been of late the Stage of Glorious Actions, and the Inhabitants have acquitted themselves with as great Valour in Martial Affairs, as any Nation whatsoever.... The Cossacks do in some measure imitate us, who took their rise from their Victories upon the Euxine, and setled themselves by incountring the Tartars in those Desart Plains, which do so far resemble the Sea, that the Mariners Compass may be useful for Direction in the one, as well as the other.^[265]

What was the relationship, if any, between Cossackdom and nation­hood, how were social and national identities interconnected in Ruthen- ian society, and what was the role of religion in that relationship? In addressing these questions, it is useful to begin by quoting from Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the most eminent Ukrainian historian and one of the fore­most authorities on the history of Cossackdom. Like Brown in the seven­teenth century, Hrushevsky, writing in the early twentieth century, linked Cossackdom and nationhood, but in a manner profoundly different from Brown’s. He believed that by participating actively in the consecra­tion of the new Orthodox hierarchy in the autumn of 1620, the Ukrainian Cossacks had entered upon a qualitatively new period of their history, be­coming a leading force in the Ukrainian national renaissance of their time.

Apropos of this, Hrushevsky wrote:

Cossackdom entered a new era of its existence by rendering an extremely im­portant service to the religious and thus also the national life of Ukraine, and by deliberately, from that time on, making service to Ukrainian national needs in their religious form part of the Cossack program.

Hrushevsky frequently noted the close bond that actually existed at the time between national and religious consciousness in Ukraine, but warned his readers against oversimplifying the matter. ‘The concept of nationality’, he wrote in his study of the seventeenth-century cultural and national movement, ‘which is so elementally obvious to us in its present form, is a creation of very recent times. As a rule, in earlier times it was wholly supplanted by other concepts—political, class, and religious alle­giances, as well as geographic and cultural characteristics.’^[267] Clearly, Hru- shevsky did not consider the Cossacks a nation, but saw them as closely linked with the Ukrainian identity of their day and, indeed, ascribed to them a leading role in the Ukrainian national movement of the first half of the seventeenth century.^[268] Was he right to do so?

In the Ruthenian (Ukrainian-Belarusian) lands of the latter half of the sixteenth century, the intermingling of political, administrative, and reli­gious boundaries led to the formation of a distinct identity that combined a number of political, ethnic, and religious elements.^[269] The political div­ision of the lands of the former Kyivan Rus’ slowly but surely wore away the idea of the unity of Rus’ that had been developed by the Kyivan elite during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. On either side of the Lithuan­ian-Mongol border of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, descen­dants of the Kyivan rulers developed a distinct political consciousness and tradition.

The Union of Lublin (1569) between Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was one of the main cornerstones of the future Ukrainian- Belarusian boundary and helped to initiate the disintegration of the com­mon Ruthenian (Ukrainian-Belarusian) identity. The decisions made at Lublin not only established an administrative boundary between Poland and Lithuania more or less coinciding with the present-day Ukrain­ian-Belarusian border but also united Galicia and Western Podilia, ac­quired earlier by the Poles and already within the Kingdom of Poland, with the remaining Ukrainian territories to the east. Thus, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, the Ukrainian lands were separated by a pol­itical and ecclesiastical boundary from Muscovite Rus’, by an adminis­trative boundary from Lithuanian Rus’, and by a religious boundary from Poland.

Rus’ was often defined by the Ruthenian authors of the time in territorial, religious, and ethnic categories. The characteristic most often used to denote the Ruthenian community appears to have been ethno- cultural.^[271] Reference was also made to a distinct ‘Ruthenian nation’ (narod, narod) equal to the Polish and Lithuanian nations, but terms de­noting sovereign statehood and fatherland (natio, patria) were rarely used with respect to Rus'.⁸ In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Ruthenian identity was also marked by distinct ethnoreligious features.

The link between ethnicity and religion took on importance for Rus’ long before early modern times because of its location on the boundary between Western and Eastern Christianity and its Islamic neighbors. In the early modern period, given the absence of common Ruthenian state institutions, the church became the ideal indicator of Ruthenian identity. The Kyivan metropolitanate had its own jurisdictional territory, hier­archical structure, and separate historical tradition, united people of the same or similar ethnic origin, used a Slavic language to the exclusion of all others, and followed its own (Julian) calendar. The clergy constituted a distinct social order with an interest in maintaining all the distinctions enumerated above, for the church of Rus’ had traditionally wielded spir­itual power over the Rus’ people and sought to maintain it at all costs.

What were the possible consequences of the Union of Brest for Ruthenian identity? One consequence could have been the superimpos­ition of religious boundaries on political ones, following ‘normal’ practice in contemporary Europe. As a result of the union, the boundary between the Commonwealth and Muscovy could have been transformed into a Catholic-Orthodox one, and there were excellent grounds to suppose that the boundary between Poland and Rus’ would become a border not between two different confessions, but between two Catholic rites. The principle ‘Cuius regio, eius religio', decreed by the Council of Augsburg in 1555, reflected not only the formula of compromise attained in Germany at the time but also the principle employed to settle all Euro­pean conflicts between denominational and political boundaries.

The Union of Brest did not, however, lead to a simple shift of the reli­gious boundary.

Synonima slavenorosskaia, prepared by an anonymous seventeenth-century compiler on the basis of Berynda’s Leksykon. See Leksys Lavrentiia Zyzaniia. Synonima slavenorosskaia, ed. V. V. Nimchuk (Kyiv, 1964), p. 172.

⁸ See, for example, the characterization of the use of these terms by Smotrytsky in Frick, MeletijSmotryc'kyj, pp. 230-2. It should be noted nevertheless that their meaning was not fully established for a long time, and the words ‘gens’ and ‘natio’ were used interchangeably. For ex­ample, Stanislav Orikhovsky, whose self-identification as ‘gente Ruthenus, natione Polonus’ is well known to scholars, also described himself as ‘gente Scytha, natione Ruthena’, and called ‘Russia’ his ‘patria’. See Sysyn, ‘Concepts of Nationhood in Ukrainian History Writing, 1620-1690’, p. 397.

⁹ See Hrushevs’kyi, Istoriia UkraIny-Rusy, 6: 295-301. On Piotr Skarga’s use of the terms ‘Ruthenian’ (ruski) and ‘Muscovite’ (moskiewski), see Plokhii, Papstvo i Ukraina, p. 13. separate hierarchies drew boundaries not across territories, but within the souls of individual Ruthenians. The situation that developed was regret­table, but far from unique: religious differences and wars in France, the Thirty Years’ War in Central Europe, and the spread of Protestantism in the Commonwealth had similar consequences for the French, Germans, and Poles. In the Ruthenian lands of the Commonwealth, the ecclesias­tical division brought about by the Union of Brest was superimposed on already existing political, cultural, and ethnic fault lines. Considering the role played by the religious element in the consciousness of early modern Ruthenian society, it is hardly surprising that the superimposition of the new division on old boundaries ultimately called forth the appearance and development of new models of cultural identity in Rus’.

The events of the Reformation and the Catholic reform movement in Western and Central Europe showed that religious conflict and reconcili­ation could be as potent a factor in the formation of modern national identities as natural barriers and state boundaries.

The new consciousness took shape in response to the challenge issued by the camps of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation to ‘underde­veloped’ Orthodox Rus’. The Protestant challenge made itself felt before the Catholic one. It provoked almost no serious polemical conflict (espe­cially as compared with the deluge of religious polemics that attended the enactment of the Union of Brest), but it was keenly felt in Rus’. Orthodox priests in Lviv began complaining about conversions of their faithful to Protestantism as early as the 1560s, and many of the previously Orthodox families enumerated among the lost adornments of the ‘Eastern Church’ in Meletii Smotrytsky’s Threnos were in fact lost to various currents of Protestantism. The change of denomination led almost automatically to a change of nationality and, as Janusz Tazbir has noted with reference to the activity of the Protestant church of the Polish Brethren in Volhynia, the Polonization of the Volhynian nobility was carried out by means of that very church.^[272]

Agitation in favor of a church union between the Kyivan metropolit­anate and Rome was undertaken in the 1560s and 1570s by Benedykt Herbest and Piotr Skarga. Even though the Orthodox were twenty years late in responding to the challenge, Skarga’s book marked the beginning of a polemic that forever changed the outlook of Rus’ on itself and its neighbors. The circumstances of the struggle between the Orthodox and Uniates for the spiritual and material legacy of the once-united Kyivan metropolitanate obliged both sides to emphasize their loyalty to the past and to Ruthenian tradition. Otherwise they would have had no hope of carrying the day in the Ruthenian milieu on the issue of true piety or of dealing with the royal administration when it came to conflicts over prop­erty. All the privileges accumulated between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries had been granted by Lithuanian princes and Polish kings to the ‘Ruthenian’ church and the ‘Ruthenian nation’, hence, in order to claim those privileges, both parties had to establish their ‘Rus’ identity’. The Orthodox were better positioned to defend their right to the ‘legacy of the past’ and Ruthenian identity, as Rus’ and Orthodoxy were closely linked in the minds of contemporaries, making it possible to accuse the Uniates in perpetuity of having introduced ‘novelties’ and changes to the old religion.¹¹

The Uniates as a whole came out strongly against their opponents’ effort to deprive them of their claim to Ruthenian identity. The Uniate nobility drew a clear distinction between its Ruthenian origin and its denominational allegiance. If the Orthodox nobility constantly spoke on behalf of the entire Ruthenian nation, the Uniate nobles never claimed to do so, but rather represented that part of the Polish-Lithuanian nobiliary political nation that was conscious of its Ruthenian origin. Although the Orthodox theoretically recognized the possibility of dividing Rus’ into

pp. 37-53, and works by Henryk Litwin, ‘Katolizacja szlachty ruskiej, 1569-1647: Stosunki wyz- naniowe na Kijowszczyznie i Braclawszczyznie’, Przeglqd Powszechny 10 (1985): 58-70; id., ‘Catholicization among the Ruthenian Nobility and Assimilation Processes in the Ukraine dur­ing the Years 1569-1648’, Acta Poloniae Historica 55 (1987): 57-83; id., Naplyw szlachty polskiej na Ukraine, 1569-1648. Litwin claims that cultural Polonization was a precondition for the con­version of the Ruthenian nobility to Roman Catholicism.

¹¹ See, for example, the characterization of Orthodoxy as ‘the legacy of our fathers’ and ‘ecclesiastical antiquities’ and of the Union as a ‘novelty’ and a ‘new pleasure’ in Metropolitan Iov Boretsky’s circular letter of December 1621 (Golubev, Mitropolit Petr Mogila, vol. 1, appendixes, p. 263). The identification of the Union with novelty and Orthodoxy with antiquity was not limited to Boretsky’s writings. A patron of Orthodoxy in Lithuania, the Protestant prince Krzysztof Radziwill, also referred to it as ‘the old Ruthenian worship’ (ibid., p. 364), while Kasiian Sakovych called the Union a ‘novelty’ in his Verses (‘... for the faith every true Christian is prepared | To die, and he will not permit himself to be forced into novelty’). See ‘Virshi na zhalosnyi pohreb’ in Ukrams’ka literaturaXVIIst., p. 230. On the close association of antiquity with positive qualities and ‘novelty’ with negative ones in the early seventeenth century, see M. M. Krom, ‘“Stanna” kak kategoriia srednevekovogo mentaliteta (po materialam Velikogo kniazhestva Litovskogo XIV—nachala XVII vv.)’, MU, no. 3 (1994): 68-87. Orthodox and Catholic sections, in practice they denied non-Orthodox Ruthenians any right to the Ruthenian legal and cultural heritage.^[273] Their actual policies were based on the ‘axiom’ of the indivisibility of Rus' and the Ruthenian religion, by which they meant Orthodoxy alone. Among the Orthodox, it was perhaps only Meletii Smotrytsky who attempted to break the rigid link between Rus’ and religious denomination, arguing that it was not faith but birth and blood that made a Ruthenian a Ruthenian.^[274]

The schism confronted both Ruthenian churches with the ineluctable need to develop new forms of self-identification different from those pos­sessed or claimed by the opposing side. One of the problems requiring immediate resolution was that of naming the two Ruthenian religious communities that had come into existence as a result of the schism caused by the Union of Brest. The Orthodox hierarchy restored in 1620 referred to its faithful as ‘Orthodox Ruthenians’, ‘the Christian Orthodox Ruthenian nation’, ‘the Ruthenian nation of Eastern Orthodoxy’, and so on.^[275] The confessional element had an important place in these self­designations, stressing the membership of the Ruthenian Orthodox Church in the broader Eastern Christian community. The Uniates, on the other hand, rather effectively associated themselves with the broader Catholic world by means of their adopted name and their polemics with the Orthodox. Thus the Confessionalization of nomenclature promoted the formation of separate ethnoreligious identities in Rus’.^[276]

The participation of Cossackdom in the consecration of the new Orthodox hierarchy in 1620 and its championing of one side in the religious conflict necessitated a rethinking of the position of the Cossacks in Ruthenian society and an explanation of their new role to that society, then divided into two warring camps, as well as to the royal administra­tion and the Polish-Lithuanian nobiliary elite, which deliberated at the Commonwealth Diets and actively influenced the course of the religious conflict in Rus’. The changing social, religious, and ethnocultural image of Cossackdom in the Ruthenian and Polish writings of the period is the main focus of this chapter.

The Noble Nation

The ‘confessionalization’ of Cossackdom, that is, its representation in the eyes of contemporary society as a legitimate member of the Orthodox bloc, was a task that presented its own special problems. On the one hand, although the Uniates generally resisted including the Cossacks within their camp, Rome, in search of allies in its anti-Ottoman struggle, as well as certain Polish publicists who wrote turcicae (anti-Ottoman pamphlets), continued to treat Cossackdom as part of a united Christian sphere rather than as representing a hostile denomination. On the other hand, the integration of Cossackdom into the world of Orthodoxy en­countered opposition on the part of remnants of the princely clans and the Ukrainian Orthodox nobility, which challenged the right of the ‘Zaporozhian rascals’ to represent the interests of the Orthodox Church and the entire ‘Ruthenian nation’ to the king.

The Cossacks were not the first non-nobiliary group to take upon itself the defense of the rights of the ‘Ruthenian nation’ and its religion. The first such group was made up of the Ukrainian burghers, united in their brotherhoods. But the brotherhoods’ efforts in that regard were rejected or even condemned by the pre-Brest hierarchy. The Orthodox hierarchy of ‘Theophanes’s consecration’ found itself in a fundamentally different situation from its predecessors of the late sixteenth century. It could ex­pect no support from the king or the princes, hence it not only accepted but actively welcomed the new role of the ‘ill-born’ Cossacks as repre­sentatives and protectors of Rus’ and its religious liberties.

The nobiliary conception of Rus’, or the ‘Ruthenian nation’, like the prevailing conception of the Polish nation and most early modern Euro­pean nations, was very clearly framed in terms of social estates.^[277] It was founded on the tradition, revived by Ostrih and Kyiv intellectuals, of grand-princely Kyiv and on the Ruthenian interpretation of the Union of Lublin (1569), according to which the king had guaranteed the princes and nobles—the ‘noble residents’ (obywatele) of the Ruthenian lands— immunity of the Ruthenian faith. Thus historical rights derived from an­cient Kyiv and legal ones proceeding from the Union of Lublin and guaranteeing freedom of religion pertained, according to this concep­tion, exclusively to princely and nobiliary Rus’. Other social estates were neither part of the ‘Ruthenian nation’ nor, in this context, components of Rus’ from a legal point of view. Such a position had a certain logic, for in a nobiliary state such as the Commonwealth, it was precisely the nobility that could represent and, indeed, for some time actually did represent the interests of all Rus’ most effectively.

In the second half of the sixteenth century, princely and nobiliary op­position to royal authority found expression in the vigorous application by the leaders of Ruthenian society of the results of the so-called ‘legal and historical revolution of the mid-sixteenth century’. As defined by J. H. Elliott, that revolution meant the rejection by European intellectuals of the exclusive application of Roman law in favor of the revival of custom­ary law, once again endowed with its old significance and authority, which became a powerful weapon in the aristocracy’s struggle against the encroachments of the absolute monarchy. As Elliott notes, ‘This “aristo­cratic constitutionalism” of the later sixteenth century was regarded, at least initially, as a means of defence. But historic rights were capable of al­most indefinite extension once the initial point had been gained.’^[278]

Claims based upon the old privileges and traditional rights of Rus' and the ‘Ruthenian faith' were potent weapons in the arsenal of Prince Os- trozky and the polemicists of his entourage. Even so, in the appeals of Os- trozky and his learned circle to history one may discern not only ‘aristocratic constitutionalism' but also a phenomenon that may provi­sionally be termed ‘dynastic legalism'. By this term I mean the efforts of representatives of aristocratic clans not only to undermine the authority of the reigning king but also to advance claims to the royal Crown by mak­ing reference to their own dynastic rights. Actual or even imagined mem­bership in a ruling dynasty that had once ruled a sovereign state and then lost power when the country forfeited its independence was of consider­able importance in Europe at that time. The South and West Slavs, who had lost their sovereign independence as a result of aggression on the part of the Ottoman Turks or the Habsburg Monarchy, preserved legends and tales associating the rebirth of their lost statehood with representatives of the dynasties that had once ruled those lands.

In Ukraine it was precisely the Ostrozky family that most actively sought to establish its origins in the times of Kyivan Rus' and claimed close kinship with the Riuryk dynasty. Such claims found an echo in a number of panegyrics dedicated to Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky.¹⁸ These panegyrics display a tendency to associate the activity of Prince Ostrozky with the times of Kyivan Rus' and to compare his merits with those of Prince Volodymyr the Great. It would appear that Kostiantyn (Vasyl) Os- trozky did not inherit an interest in the traditions of Kyivan Rus' from his father, the eminent political and military leader Kostiantyn Ivanovych Ostrozky, who served as hetman of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Such an interest was rather an ‘innovation' of the second half of the sixteenth century. Evidence of this is to be found in a comparison of texts com­posed in praise of the older and younger Oztrozkys, Kostiantyn Ivanovych and Kostiantyn Kostiantynovych.

In the so-called Shorter Volhynian Chronicle, whose concluding section is a panegyric to Prince Kostiantyn Ivanovych Ostrozky, his victory over the forces of the Grand Principality of Muscovy is noted with the following words:

elita—nosii “kontynui'tetu realii” mizh kniazhoiu Russiu i kozats'koiu Ukrainoiu', Suchasnist', no. i (1994): 118-24; Sysyn, ‘Ukrainian-Polish Relations in the Seventeenth Century'; id., ‘Regionalism and Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ukraine'. On the attitude toward the past and the rediscovery of the Old Rus' heritage in early modern Rus', see Hrushevs'kyi, Istoriia ukrams’ko'i Iiteratury, 6: 298-301; Krom, ‘“Starina” kak kategoriia srednevekovogo mentaliteta'; Oleksii Tolochko, ‘ “Rus' ” ochyma “Ukrainy”'.

¹⁸ There is an extensive literature on Kostiantyn Ostrozky. For a listing of major publications, see M. P. Koval's'kyi, ‘Ostroz'kyi kn. Vasyl'-Kostiantyn Kostiantynovych (1526 (1527)-1608)' in Ostroz'ka Akademiia XVI-XVII st., pp. 129-30 and Chynczewska-Hennel, ‘Ostrogski, Konstanty Wasyl, ks⅛e (ok. 1526-1608)'. For the most recent biographical study, see Kempa, Konstanty Wasyl Ostrogski.

You are like the great valiant knights of the famous town of Rhodes who by their courage keep safe many Christian castles from infidel hands.... By your courage in resisting such a powerful lord, you have come to attain the same glory and honor; with that service of yours you have brought gladness to your overlord, the great King Zygmunt. For such an act you deserve not only to sit on the thrones of local great capitals, but to rule God's city of Jerusalem itself.^[279]

In honoring the elder Ostrozky, the chronicler alludes rather openly to his ambitions of taking power in the ‘great capitals’, but that aspiration is not supported in the Chronicle by references to Ostrozky’s descent from the grand-princely line of Kyivan Rus’, which would seem natural in this context. Nor does the Chronicle compare Kostiantyn Ivanovych Os- trozky with the medieval Kyivan princes, although it draws parallels with biblical personages and heroes of antiquity, and makes mention of Zygmunt I, king of Poland and grand prince of Lithuania.

A very different picture emerges when one examines the panegyrical literature dedicated to Kostiantyn (Vasyl) Ostrozky. In the poem ‘Vsiakoho chyna pravoslavnyi chytateliu’ (Orthodox reader of every degree), included in the Ostrih Bible (1581), its author, Herasym Smotrytsky, overtly associates the activity of Kostiantyn (Vasyl) Ostrozky with the times of Kyivan Rus’, comparing the merits of his patron with those of the Kyivan grand princes Volodymyr and Iaroslav. The basis for these comparisons was the attitude of the princes to the Orthodox Church, as is clearly apparent from the following lines of Smotrytsky’s poem:

For Volodymyr enlightened his nation by baptism,

While Kostiantyn brought them light with the writings of holy wisdom. Then polytheism was abolished with its idolatrous temptations;

Today the sole ruling Godhead is worshipped.

Iaroslav embellished Kyiv and Chernihiv with church buildings, While Kostiantyn raised up the one universal church with writings.^[280]

Such analogies and parallels have a distinct political coloring, given that Kostiantyn Ostrozky claimed the direct descent of his dynasty from the Riurykide princes of Kyiv and was considered one of the possible can­didates for the royal throne of Poland. In analyzing the activities of Prince Ostrozky and his relations with Rome in 1582—4, Jan Krajcar wrote of

Oztrozky’s ‘Constantine complex’, referring to literary comparisons of Kostiantyn with the Roman emperor Constantine the Great.^[281] There would appear to be no less reason, and perhaps even more, to speak of Ostrozky’s ‘Volodymyr complex’, especially as it was not uncommon for Ruthenian authors to compare Volodymyr the Great with Constantine the Great. In a section of his Palinode (1622) dedicated to Kostiantyn (Vasyl) Ostrozky, the Orthodox polemicist Zakhariia Kopystensky follows Herasym Smotrytsky in comparing him with Prince Volodymyr, reminding the reader that Volodymyr, like Ostrozky, was christened with the name Vasyl: ‘Prince Ostrozky, Vasylii Kostiantynovych, traces his lineage from the blessed generation of Japheth-Ros': he is a true descen­dant of the most famous Volodymyr, named Vasyl in holy baptism, the great monarch, and Danylo, Ruthenian princes.’^[282]

As recent genealogical research has shown, there is serious doubt that the Ostrozkys were actually related to the Riurykides. It has even been hy­pothesized that the Ostrozkys were of Lithuanian descent, belonging to one of the branches of the Gediminoviches,^[283] and in other circumstances their genealogy might have been traced in a completely different manner by the bookmen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Os- trozkys might have been associated with the grand princes of Lithuania, or, for example, with the ruling dynasties of East-Central Europe. All the same, Ukrainian intellectuals represented Ostrozky exclusively as a des­cendant of the Kyivan princes. Such a genealogy stressed the independ­ence of the Ostrozkys' rule from that of the Polish kings and Lithuanian princes, potentially confronting the latter with the threat of an imagined blood tie between the Ostrozkys and the last Riurykides to occupy the Muscovite throne.

The European historical and legal revolution of the mid-sixteenth cen­tury and Prince Ostrozky’s renewed interest in the Orthodox tradition offered almost unlimited scope for the expression, formulation, and legitimation of the prince’s active opposition to the ecclesiastical union of 1596, a union fully supported by the royal authorities. At first glance, the Ostrozkys and other Orthodox princes failed in their confrontation with royal authority: the Council of Brest took place and the union of the Kyivan metropolitanate with Rome was proclaimed and put into effect, while the princely families themselves either died out or gave up their opposition to the king, abandoning their support of the Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, as far as the continued existence of the Orthodox Church was concerned, the failure was only a partial one, for Ostrozky and his supporters among the nobility, clergy, and burghers managed to preserve the Orthodox ecclesiastical structure. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, it survived the struggle with the Uniate Church, which enjoyed the support of the king, largely because of support from the middle and lower ranks of the nobility.

The nobiliary Rus' of the first half of the seventeenth century de­veloped their own model of the Ruthenian nation, one that did not stress dynastic links with the Kyivan Rus' princes, but legal rights acquired by the Ruthenian nobility as a result of the Union of Lublin. Despite these differences of interpretation, both the Ruthenian nobility and the representatives of princely families were united in their uncompromising opposition to any change in the estate-based model of the Ruthenian nation. Most interestingly, such a rigid approach was shared by Ruthe- nian nobles on both sides of the religious divide. Orthodox and Uniate nobles alike rejected the claims of non-nobiliary social groups to repre­sent the Ruthenian nation and religion to the outside world. The most typical statements to that effect are to be found in the polemical tracts of the early 1620s, whose appearance was provoked by the consecration of the new Orthodox hierarchy in the autumn of 1620.

From the Orthodox side we have a number of contemporary docu­ments that elucidate the attitude of the noble order to the consecration of the new hierarchy. They all enumerate the wrongs suffered by the Ortho­dox as a result of the church union and emphasize the rights of Rus'.^[284] The most interesting of these documents is the Supplication of Residents of the Noble Order (1622).^[285] The authors of the Supplication based their whole concept of the defense of the Orthodox Church on the protection of the rights and prerogatives of the noble estate guaranteed to the Ruthenians by the kings of Poland, beginning with the Union of Lublin. To that end they created an idealized image, favorable to Rus', of Zygmunt August II and Stefan Batory, depicting them as guarantors and protectors of the rights of the Ruthenian religion. As far as the development of Ruthenian political consciousness was concerned, the most important aspect of the Supplication was the authors' interpretation of the legal nature of the Union of Lublin and the political association that it had brought into being. As seen by Ruthenian nobles, it was a union of three free and equal nations—Poland, Lithuania, and Rus'. Emphasizing the rights of Rus', the authors of the Supplication noted that.. the Ruthenian nation had this previously, and did not obtain it only through incorporation, that we remain a free nation, equal in all respects to the Polish nation!’^[286]

Elsewhere in the document, contrasting the political union (of Lublin) with the church union (of Brest), they asserted: ‘So far there has been complete agreement on the civic union for the defense of the integrity of the fatherland and freedom of the rights and liberties of all three nations: let the bone of contention of that fictional union be removed from their midst.... Better that Poland, Lithuania, and Rus’ together come to their senses before any harm is done.’^[287] In effect, the Orthodox nobility of Rus’ attempted to read into the Union of Lublin what was not there at all, and in that interpretation, which it attempted to impose on the govern­ment, it transformed the Commonwealth of two nations (Poles and Lithuanians) into a Commonwealth of three nations—Poles, Lithuanians, and Ruthenians.

Meletii Smotrytsky developed similar ideas in his works.^[288] In his protestation of 1621, the Kyivan metropolitan Iov Boretsky also noted that the advance of the Union threatened good relations between Poland and ‘ancient Rus’’, making reference to rights granted to the Ruthenian nation by the monarchs and princes of Rus’ and even speaking of separate Ruthenian and Lithuanian principalities when it came to the current situ­ation in the Commonwealth.^[289] In the second variant of the protestation, Iov Boretsky made reference not only to ‘innate Christian liberty’, but also to the ‘resolution of the Kyiv principality for union with the Crown in the year 1569’.^[290] The Supplication was based on more than twenty-five years’ experience of struggle for the rights of the Orthodox nobility, employed arguments drawn from previous polemical works,^[291] and, in its own way, laid out a plan of action for the Ruthenian nobility to follow over the next several decades.

The views of the authors of the Supplication set forth above also corres­ponded to the ideas expressed in the text of a Diet speech delivered in 1621 by the Volhynian nobleman Lavrentii Drevynsky.^[292] Like the authors of the Supplication, Drevynsky neither defends nor condemns the new hierarchy or the participation of the Cossacks in its consecration. He does not mention the new hierarchs at all, and the lengthy Supplication touches on their consecration only once, requesting the authorities to lift the ban on the hierarchs and permit them to occupy their sees. This seemingly de­liberate silence is highly symptomatic and eloquent, given that other sources attest to support on the part of the Volhynian and Kyivan nobil­ity for the consecration of the new hierarchy in the autumn of 1620 and the spring of 1621.^[293] Insistence on the rights of Rus' and silence with regard to the new hierarchy and the Cossacks imply, on the one hand, de facto support for their actions on the part of the Orthodox nobility, and, on the other, an attempt by Orthodox writers to abide by the letter of the law and not to associate themselves—publicly, at any rate—with the il­legal consecration and the actions of the Cossacks. It is clear that under such conditions the nobiliary authors chose to avoid a direct discussion of the legitimacy of the new Orthodox hierarchy, preferring to attack the le­gitimacy of the Uniate one. Ironically, both Drevynsky's speech and the Supplication, which took that approach, included theses that in fact un­dermined the basic legitimacy of the new hierarchy.

Both documents were sharply critical of several Uniate hierarchs who were not of noble origin, according to the Orthodox authors. ‘Who does not see with his own eyes', notes Drevynsky, ‘that the present bishop of Peremyshl, Shyshka by surname, was born of a swineherd, and that his father's natural-born brother is even now sitting on the parcel of land in Khlopushi in service to the palatine of Kyiv?'^[294] Drevynsky and the authors of the Supplication are no more favorable in their characterizations of other hierarchs, including Iosafat Kuntsevych, whose noble status is placed in doubt.^[295] To make such charges when a number of Orthodox bishops were also of questionable origin was more than imprudent, but quite logical if one's argument was based on the premise of a nobiliary Rus', to which the authors of these documents remained faithful. Thus the Orthodox nobility gave de facto support to the new hierarchy, but de jure, proceeding from the traditions of its own political thought, alienated itself from that same hierarchy, placing it in a very difficult situation.^[296]

How did the non-Orthodox nobility of Rus' view the relationship be­tween the social and religious components in the fabric of the Ruthenian nation? In 1621 Meletii Smotrytsky attempted to bring that element of Rus' over to his side by dedicating the second edition of the Verification of Innocence to representatives of formerly Orthodox families: Ianush Skumyn-Tyshkevych ( Janusz Skumin-Tyszkiewicz), Adam Khreptovych (Chreptowicz), Mykola (Mikolaj) Tryzna, and Iurii Meleshko (Jerzy Mieleszko).37 The answer to this unusual appeal was not long in coming, as that same year saw the publication of a Letter to the Monks of the Monastery of Vilnius³⁸ by those same worthies, setting forth the views of Catholic- Uniate Rus' on the new Orthodox hierarchy and its new ideology.

To begin with, the authors of the Letter denied the right of the Orthodox hierarchy to speak on behalf of the whole Ruthenian nation. This denial may be seen as an attempt on the part of the authors to distance themselves personally from the illegal actions of the Orthodox episcopate (the appeal addressed to them in the introduction to Smotrytsky's book placed them in a highly embarrassing position), as well as to remove the non-Orthodox Ruthenian nobility as a whole from the line of fire of the state and Polish-Lithuanian Catholic society, given that charges of support for the new hierarchy and ‘treason' were often levelled against Rus' in general. The most important aspect of the denial was the authors' attempt to break out of the vicious circle that implacably linked Rus' as an ethnic unit with Ruthenian Orthodoxy. ‘How is the honorable nation of Rus' to blame for the suits of those aspirants of yours to church offices? Through our ances­tors we are descended from the nation of Rus', but... [your cause] does not involve... either us or the descendants of those [families] that you have enumerated in that Lament ’, wrote the authors of the Letter.³⁹

been presented to the king and had not been commended by him to the patriarch!' (Hru- shevs'kyi, Istoriia ukratns’kotIiteratury, 6: 290—2.

The views of the Orthodox nobility on the election of future bishops by the nobility are best expressed in the documents arising from the protracted struggle of the Orthodox nobility of Peremyshl against the Uniate bishop Atanasii Krupetsky, who had been imposed on them by the royal administration. In a letter written to the Polish king in April 1611, the nobles rejected Kru- petsky's candidacy, calling him ‘unheard-of, unseen and unknown in our land of Peremyshl and in the whole Ruthenian palatinate as well' and requested that ‘a man from among ourselves worthy of being bishop' be presented for consecration (see the text of the letter in Golubev, Mitropolit Petr Mogila, vol. 1, appendixes, pp. 190—2). Clearly, the election of bishops for Rus' as a whole by an indeterminate group of people in Kyiv was not entirely acceptable to the Ruthen- ian nobility outside the Kyiv palatinate.

³⁷ See the facsimile of the second edition of the Verification in Collected Works of Meletij Smotryc’kyj, p. 314.

³⁸ See the reprint of this publication, ‘List do zakonnikov Vilenskogo Sviato-Dukhovskogo monastyria' in AIuZR (1914): pt. 1, vol. 8, pp. 732—61, here 732—6. Hrushevsky discusses the letter in detail in his Istoriia ukratns’kotliteratury, 6: 252—5.

³⁹ Quoted in Hrushevs'kyi, Istoriia ukratns’kotliteratury, 6: 253. For a discussion of the strong complex of inferiority and ‘self-hatred' characteristic of a significant portion of the Ruthenian elite, see Frick, ‘ “Foolish Rus' ”'.

Boretsky, Smotrytsky, and, in their persons, all members of the newly consecrated hierarchy were denied the right to represent the whole nation of Rus' not only because Rus' did not constitute a denominational unit (this was hinted at in the above-mentioned reference to the list of Ruthen­ian families enumerated in the Lament (Smotrytsky's Threnos), that had abandoned Orthodoxy) but also because they were allegedly not of noble descent and, as ‘upstarts from the common people', could not belong to the ‘nation of Rus'' in its princely and nobiliary incarnation. In their at­tack on the non-nobiliary hierarchs of the other church, the Uniate authors of the Letter proved as intolerant and aggressive as their brethren of the Orthodox nobility. ‘What is this “one blood”—that of our nobility and the plebeians? What relation to the peasantry?' says the letter. ‘You join yourselves by blood and equate yourselves in lineage with the ancient Ruthenian families, [claiming] that you are also Rus' simply because of your descent: that is a stupid claim, not in keeping with monastic modesty.'^[297]

The Uniates, unlike the Orthodox who wrote the Supplication, also touched upon the Cossack problem in their missive. Given the time at which they were writing, they broached the matter very cautiously: after the defeat at TTutora (1620), Cossack units were essential for the coming war with the Ottomans, and their support was being solicited by the high­est dignitaries of the Commonwealth, including the king himself. In the Letter, the Cossacks were depicted as a knightly race that had involuntar­ily become a tool of the newly consecrated hierarchy and, acting on its in­structions, had presented the king with demands on behalf of the whole Ruthenian nation. Although in this instance it was the Orthodox hier­archy that was made to shoulder most of the blame, there was also a per­fectly obvious condemnation and rejection of the whole idea of Cossack intervention in religious affairs and of the notion that Cossackdom could represent the interests of the ‘nation of Rus''. Furthermore, the Letter in­dicated that the praise heaped upon the Cossacks in Orthodox writings and publications ‘betrayed' the true intentions of the newly consecrated hierarchy. Thus the hierarchy's praise of the Cossacks was exploited in order to compromise it in the eyes of its opponents.

The authors of the Letter, who referred to themselves as ‘politicians in the Commonwealth' (and thus declared themselves members of the Pol­ish-Lithuanian political nation first and foremost) were as insistent as their Orthodox counterparts in rejecting the notion that social strata of non-noble origin could belong to the Ruthenian nation. Both the Uniate and the Orthodox nobility rejected the non-noble clergy (each with refer­ence to the opposing camp) and denied its right to represent the Ruthen- ian nation. Moreover, they took the same attitude to the dangerous and rebellious Cossacks, either by passing them over in silence or by advanc­ing very cautious criticism of them.

Cossacks into Ruthenians

The task of substantiating and legitimizing the new role of Cossackdom in Ukrainian society and Ukrainian religious life devolved onto the shoul­ders of those intellectual forces that benefited most from Cossack assist­ance and support. Those forces were the new Orthodox hierarchy, illegal in the eyes of the state, which had been consecrated under the protection of the Cossack sword in the autumn of 1620, and the Kyivan clergy, which was closely associated with Zaporizhia. The views of the Orthodox elite on the social significance and new role of Cossackdom found their fullest expression in a whole series of political, historical, and poetical works written in Kyiv in the 1620s. Their authors carried out a transition, sig­nificant for political thought, from publicistic and literary works dedi­cated to the princes to works written in praise of Cossack hetmans.

The active involvement of Cossackdom in the socio-political life of the Ukrainian lands in the first quarter of the seventeenth century was clear evidence that when it came to protecting Orthodoxy and representing the interests of the ‘Ruthenian nation’, the Cossack order was ever more clearly supplanting the princely one. With the extinction or conversion to Catholicism and Polonization of the princely clans, whose real or im­agined descent from the house of Riuryk was already well ‘documented’ in contemporary historical tradition, it was only natural that the ‘grace’ of grand-princely Kyiv should come to repose on other shoulders at least potentially capable of carrying on the princely tradition of protecting and supporting the Orthodox Church against the growing pressure of Counter-Reformation Catholicism and royal authority.

A mere decade passed between the publication of Meletii Smotrytsky’s celebrated Threnos (1610) and the consecration of the Orthodox hier­archy under Cossack protection, but in that time the social orientation of the Orthodox polemicists and the tone of their writings changed beyond recognition. If Smotrytsky shed tears on behalf of the church for the house of the Ostrozkys and the princely lines of the Slutskys, Zaslavskys, Zbarazkys, ‘and others without number, whom it would be tedious to list individually’,^[298] then Iov Boretsky, Kasiian Sakovych, and other authors of the 1620s sang the praises of the new ‘ornament’ of the church, the Zaporozhian Cossacks, endowing them with historical legitimacy.

In the eyes of many of their contemporaries, neither the new Orthodox hierarchs nor the Zaporozhians belonged to the ‘ancient’ princely and nobiliary Rus’. Not all bishops could pride themselves on undeniable noble descent. Nevertheless, it was an important feature of the situation in Rus’ that the nobiliary stratum did not have an absolute monopoly on representing the interests of the Ruthenian Church and nation, nor was it able completely to ignore the claims of other social orders to Ruthenian identity. Those orders, most notably the clergy and the burghers united in brotherhoods, also enjoyed privileges with regard to religious liberty and property.

As the polemical writings and correspondence of the 1620s indicate, the church had its own particular view of the social composition of the Ruthenian nation. Since the Ruthenian Church and nation were in fact identified with each other by the authors of polemical treatises, and, ac­cording to their logic, the Ruthenian Church included the whole Ruthen- ian nation, it followed that the nation, like the church itself, had to include all the social components of Rus’, beginning with the princes and ending with the commoners.^[299] A good indication of this is the appeal to the faithful in Iov Boretsky’s circular letters addressed to ‘every man of the holy Eastern religion of the Ruthenian nation’, ‘to the whole commu­nity of the faithful of the Eastern Church of the illustrious Ruthenian nation of every clerical and secular order of every degree’, etc.^[300] This ‘expanded’ treatment of the concept of the Ruthenian nation was no in­novation on Boretsky’s part, and was shared by Herasym Smotrytsky, among others, as is shown by the opening words of one of his introduc­tions to the Ostrih Bible (1581): ‘Orthodox reader of every degree...’. The same pattern of treating a nation as a body composed of a number of orders is to be found in Uniate writings of the period. For example, an un­published work by Iosafat Kuntsevych, ‘On the Falsification of Slavonic Writings’, was addressed ‘To all orders, clerical and secular, of our Ruthenian nation’.^[301] In the writings of the clergy, the Ruthenian nation was most commonly divided into two major orders, clerical and secular. If the clerical order was not further differentiated, the secular one was generally considered to include the princes/nobles and commoners. This second component was variously described for the purposes of a given document, but in general, second place in the secular hierarchy of Ruthenian society was accorded to the burghers.^[302]

A comparison of two variants of Metropolitan Boretsky’s protestation of 1621^[303] shows how the burgher element was replaced by the Cossack one and how Cossackdom was introduced into the ecclesiastical model of the Ruthenian nation. In the first variant, which is better known in mod­ern scholarship and was cited above, Boretsky notes that the protestation was drafted on behalf of the whole ‘nation of Ruthenian worship’, both clerical and secular, with the secular component divided into two orders, nobles and burghers.^[304] None the less, in another, somewhat later, version of the protestation, Boretsky writes that it was composed on behalf of ‘Their Graces the most eminent knights, the well-born and noble lords, and the entire knighthood of His Majesty’s Zaporozhian Host’.^[305] As other documents penned by Boretsky attest, the new Orthodox hierarchy re­garded the CossackZknightly order as a separate subcategory approaching the status of the nobility. Judging by Boretsky’s circular letter of Decem­ber 1621, the ‘people of the eminent Ruthenian nation’ included princes, dignitaries, noble lords, knights, and commoners.^[306] The placement of knights between the ‘noble lords’ and the commoners was not Boretsky’s invention. According to a letter from the nobility of Pinsk written in November 1627 on behalf of dignitaries, court and noble officials, nobles, knights, and residents of Pinsk county, the knightly order belonged to a more broadly conceived category of ‘noble residents’.⁵⁰

One of the first attempts to represent the Cossacks as a component of traditional Rus’ society and to extend the rights of the ‘ancient’ nobiliary nation to them is to be found in Boretsky’s protestation of 1621.⁵¹ Its main purpose was to respond to accusations that the newly ordained hierarchy was guilty of treason and was inciting the Cossacks to revolt. In respond­ing to those charges, the authors of the protestation were obliged to depict the Cossacks as an independent force and a wholly legitimate constituent of ‘ancient’ Rus’. This was accomplished in a number of ways. Firstly, the Cossacks were represented as bearers of the legacy of the grand princes of Kyiv and as a constituent part of the Ruthenian na­tion; secondly, they were deemed to be Christians who required no in­citement on the part of the clergy to take up the defense of the Orthodox faith; thirdly, they were termed ‘knightly men’, indicating their moral right to the princely and nobiliary legacy of Rus’.

According to the text of the protestation, the Cossacks belonged to the tribe of Japheth, and since time immemorial they had fought the Greeks on the Black Sea, stormed Constantinople together with Prince Oleh, and fought under the leadership of Prince Volodymyr, under whose rule they had accepted Christianity from Byzantium. The protestation repre­sented the Cossacks as exemplary Christians who were educated, wor­shipped God, were law-abiding, and did no less than the Greeks or the king of Spain to release Christian prisoners from Turkish captivity. Quite independently of the specific purposes that the authors of the protest­ation had in mind, this Christian image of the Cossacks made the new protectors of Orthodoxy legitimate representatives of Old Rus’ and its wronged religion, thereby giving them the right to represent the interests of the Orthodox Church before the king and the Commonwealth.

These ideas, which modified the old model of the Ruthenian nation and first found expression in the protestation, were subsequently formu­lated in verse. One of the literary monuments of the period, Verses on the Sorrowful Obsequy for the Worthy Knight Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, written by Kasiian Sakovych, rector of the Kyiv Brotherhood School,^[307] and recited by his pupils at a memorial service for Sahaidachny in Kyiv in 1622, overtly glorifies Cossackdom and its hetman. In so doing, it breaks fundamentally with the attitude expressed toward Cossackdom by the writers of the late sixteenth-century Ostrih circle.

It was by no means appropriate for the new Kyivan clergy to treat the Cossacks according to the princely ‘tradition’. That tradition was exem­plified in many ways by Szymon Pgkalski’s poem ‘De bello Ostrogiano ad Piantcos cum Nisoviis' (On Ostrozky’s Battle at Piatka against the Lower Dnipro Cossacks). As noted earlier, the poem describes the rebellion led by Kryshtof Kosynsky, in essence a conflict between the Cossacks and the Ostrozky family, from the viewpoint of the latter. The princes Ostrozky are represented in the poem in the full brilliance of their Kyivan tradition as descendants of Prince Volodymyr and other rulers of Kyivan Rus’. Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky appears in the poem as the inheritor and sole surviving protector of his ancestors’ glory. Judging by the text of the poem, he is devoted to the memory of his ancestors, his native Volhynia, and his larger Ruthenian homeland. On the other hand, the Zaporozhi- ans represent the ill-born and unreligious anarchic element in the poem.^[308]

Sakovych’s Verses constitute a rejection of the views of Pgkalski, who distinguished clearly between knightly Orthodox Rus’ and the ill-born, unreligious Cossacks. Like the Orthodox hierarchy’s protestation of 1621, the Verses represent the Cossacks as inheritors of the Kyivan tradition:

For this is the tribe of the seed of that Japheth

Who together with Shem covered his father’s secrets.

Under Oleh, the Rus’ monarch, they sailed

On boats on the sea and stormed Constantinople.

It was their ancestors who were baptized together with

The Rus’ monarch Volodymyr, and they kept that faith with dignity.

They still stand by it with such dignity

That in the end they are prepared to die for it;

In that army there were princes and lords

From among whom came good hetmans.^[309]

The main protagonist of the Orthodox intellectuals in the Verses on the Sorrowful Obsequy is no longer the prince but the hetman, although many characteristics attributed by Sakovych to the ‘panegyrical’ hetman were in fact transferred from the ‘panegyrical’ prince. According to the logic of the Verses, the ideal hetman (whom Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny cer­tainly represents) was to maintain a triune loyalty: to God (the Orthodox Church), the king, and the Host.^[310]

Although from the viewpoint of the defense of Christianity and Ortho­doxy the figure of Sahaidachny was almost ideally suited to panegyrical treatment, his image still required a certain amount of retouching. For one thing, he had taken part in wars with other Christian and even Orthodox peoples. Sakovych writes that Sahaidachny ‘took great... care that there be no war of Christians | With Christians, but only with infi­dels’,^[311] noting at the same time that his valor would be remembered not only by the Turks and Tatars but also by the ‘Moldavian land’, ‘the Wal­lachian’, ‘the Livonian’, and ‘the northern lands’ (i.e. Muscovy). Ac­cording to Sakovych, Sahaidachny’s merit in wars with other Christians (of whom the Moldavians, Wallachians, and Muscovites were Orthodox) consisted in the fact that ‘... when he captured a town in Christendom, | He ordered that the churches be left in peace’. In this respect, wrote Sakovych, Sahaidachny followed the example of the Polish Crown Grand Hetman Jan Zamoyski, who ordered his soldiers not to disturb Orthodox churches as they campaigned in Moldavia.^[312]

Sakovych tried to downplay the actual conflict of loyalties to the Orthodox Church and the Catholic king in the actions undertaken by Sa- haidachny to support the newly consecrated Orthodox hierarchy. Actual deeds of his that were contrary to the king’s wishes are passed over lightly in Sakovych’s account. For example, it is noted that Sahaidachny es­corted Patriarch Theophanes to the Moldavian border with the permis­sion of the king and by order of the Host, thereby endowing the entire consecration of the new hierarchy with legitimacy. Earlier in the Verses, Sakovych notes that Sahaidachny, together with the whole Host, had asked ‘the lord king’ ‘to accommodate our holy faith’, and that ‘the king and the Senate put off that request’.^[313]

The principal designation employed by the author of the Verses to de­fine the moral and ethical status of Sahaidachny and the Cossack Host as a whole is that of knight. The published Verses open with a reproduction of the emblem of the Zaporozhian Host accompanied by an explanation in verse. The emblem, often trivialized in present-day accounts as an image of a Cossack bearing a musket, is glossed in the explanatory verse as the depiction of a knight (rytser). According to the text of the Verses, the knight is a warrior who defends his fatherland and his monarch with arms in hand. Both Hetman Sahaidachny and the rank-and-file Cossacks ap­pear in the Verses as ‘worthy knights’. ‘And no knights are so famous among us | As the Zaporozhians, and so fearsome to the enemy’, notes Sakovych. The depiction of the Cossacks as knights who protected their king and country defined them as a particular social order that, albeit un­equal to the nobility in status, was still superior to the commoners and burghers, and thus deserving of special rights and freedoms.^[314]

Clearly present in the Verses is the nobiliary idea of ‘golden liberty’, which was extraordinarily popular in early modern Poland, becoming the leitmotif of nobiliary political thought and Polish Sarmatism. Sakovych represents liberty as ‘the greatest thing of all’, writing as follows:

Golden liberty—so they call it.

All strive ardently to attain it.

Yet it cannot be given to everyone,

Only to those who defend the fatherland and the lord. Knights win it by their valor in wars,

Not with money, but with blood do they purchase it.^[315]

In Sakovych’s opinion, ‘The Zaporozhian Host has obtained liberties | By its faithful service to king and country.’ According to the Verses, it was the duty both of the hetman and of the whole Host to serve the king and defend the fatherland against its enemies. In the Verses, the word ‘lord’ is often substituted for ‘king’, or the author speaks of the ‘lord king’. ‘Lib­erty’ granted by the ‘lord king’ is the reward for faithful service. In this context, then, relations between the hetman and Host on the one hand and the king on the other resemble those between vassal and suzerain.

Calling on the ‘worthy knights’ to hold fast to their own faith, Sakovych also advises the Cossacks to

Be true to the lord king in all things, For which liberty is granted to you, For, aside from the king himself, you have no lord. From taxes and courts of all kinds you are free Thanks to your meritorious services.^[316]

Sakovych and other Kyivan authors of the 1620s not only responded to the shift in the political situation by exchanging one patron (the princes) for another (the Cossacks) but also understood in some measure that in the Dnipro region of Ukraine, control over the levers of power was pass­ing before their very eyes from the princes to the hetmans and the Cos­sacks whom they led. The Hustynia Chronicle, composed in Kyiv in the 1620s, presents an account of the origins of Cossackdom that lends itself to just such an interpretation. The anonymous author of the chronicle, thought by some to have been Zakhariia Kopystensky, includes a subsec­tion entitled ‘There Are No More Princes in Rus’ ’ in the chapter on ‘The Origins of the Cossacks’, noting that ‘from internecine wars we have

ORDER, RELIGION, AND NATION l69 grown malicious and petty, and so there have ceased to be princes among us’.^[317]

On the other hand, to judge by the available sources, the attempted cre­ation of a new national model was by no means a wholly conscious or de­liberate undertaking on the part of the Orthodox intellectuals. Most probably, it was an unconscious modification of the old stereotype of Rus’ carried out under adverse circumstances of official persecution and repression. The significance of the first efforts to make the Cossacks a component of the ‘Ruthenian nation’ becomes fully apparent only in retro­spect, as one observes the waning of the nobility’s monopolistic claim to represent the ‘Ruthenian nation’ in the course of the Khmelnytsky Up­rising and the Cossack wars of the second half of the seventeenth century.

The Sarmatian Challenge

Just as ‘ancient’ Rus’ was more than reluctant to accept the services of Cossackdom and its Kyivan hierarchical clients in defense of the ‘Greek’ faith, the Cossacks became a preoccupation not only of Ruthenian intel­lectuals but of Polish ones as well. The newly acquired popularity of the Cossacks following the Battle of Khotyn and their military potential prompted efforts at ‘intellectual privatization’ and ‘nationalization’ not only on the part of Kasiian Sakovych but also by Polish publicists. Strange though it seems today, the path to the potential inclusion of the Cossacks within a broadly conceived Polish identity wound through the ideology of Polish Sarmatism.

That ideology, which became dominant in Poland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was based on the myth of the country’s Sar­matian origins. It served as a basis for the creation of an estate model of the Polish nation based predominantly on the nobiliary element. The components making up the Sarmatian ideology were a conviction of the superiority of the Commonwealth political system over all other forms of government, the treatment of ‘golden liberty’ as the supreme social value, and a notion of the Commonwealth as the ‘defensive bastion’ (antemu- rale) of the Christian world in its struggle against the threat from Islam.

The ideology of Sarmatism, which became a symbol of xenophobia and ultra-Catholicism in the second half of the seventeenth century under the influence of the Counter-Reformation and a long series of mainly unsuccessful Commonwealth wars, had a different orientation and social function in the first half of the century. In the opinion of Tadeusz Ulewicz, supported by Janusz Tazbir, the Sarmatian idea ini­tially emerged as an integrating factor that sought to unite the various ethnic and linguistic elements making up the Commonwealth.^[318] In one sense, Sarmatism supplied an ideological foundation for Polish expan­sion into Eastern Europe. Within the framework of the Commonwealth created by the Union of Lublin, Sarmatism aspired to create a family feel­ing among the Polish, Lithuanian, and Ruthenian nobles, who were equal in rights but divided along ethnic and denominational lines. As for eth­nicity, Sarmatism was associated above all with Poland, throwing wide the doors to the Lithuanian and Ruthenian nobility on the path to their progressive assimilation.

The creative work of the Polish publicist and ‘bard’ of Sarmatism, Szy- mon Starowolski, is of particular interest to students of Polish and Ukrainian identity as an interesting attempt to represent the Ruthenian and Lithuanian nobility as part of the Polish-Sarmatian noble nation, as well as to include Ukrainian Cossackdom in that national model. His first step in that direction was the publication of Eques Polonus in Venice in 1628. In that brochure, which presented the Polish nobility to a European audience as the protector of the defensive bastion of Christian Europe, a whole chapter was devoted to an account of the Zaporozhian Cossacks.^[319] Starowolski developed the Cossack theme in his book Sarmatiae bellatores (Warriors of Sarmatia), published in 1631.^[320] In it he created a pantheon of Polish Sarmatism that included, along with Mieszko I, Boleslaw the Brave, Stefan Batory, and other Polish kings, Grand Prince Volodymyr the Great of Kyiv, Prince Mykhailo Hlynsky, the princes Ostrozky, and a number of other representatives of Ruthenian princely lines. From today’s perspective, however, the greatest surprise may be Starowolski’s inclusion among his approximately 130 ‘Sarmatian warriors’ of leaders of Ukrainian Cossackdom—Ostafii Dashkovych, Havrylo Holubok, Hryhorii Loboda, and Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny—whom he con­sidered individuals of lower, non-noble, origin.

In his biographical sketch of Ostafii Dashkovych, designated here as a Ruthenian and hetman of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Starowolski notes, as if to justify the inclusion of individuals of non-noble or dubious noble origin in a biographical collection, that ‘nobility should be judged not on the basis of the glory of ancestors, but on that of an individual’s own ac­tions and deeds. It is better to attain glory if one is low-born than to de­serve scorn if one has been born into a worthy family’. In his sketch of Hryhorii Loboda (mistakenly referred to as ‘Jan’ in the book), Starowol- ski returns to the theme of nobility. He cites Seneca in support of his view that a distinguished lineage does not make one noble and notes that spirit is the sign of nobility. In his biography of Sahaidachny, Starowolski points out that even though his subject was not of noble birth, he possessed an ‘uncommon’ and ‘noble’ intelligence.

Notable in Starowolski’s account of the Cossack leaders is not so much his definitive ascription to them of common, non-noble, origin (both Dashkovych and Sahaidachny were, more likely than not, descendants of Ruthenian noble families) as his readiness to include precisely such indi­viduals—Orthodox Ruthenians of non-noble descent—in a pantheon of Polish heroes to which Sarmatiae bellatores did not even admit all the Pol­ish kings. Starowolski’s attitude toward the Cossacks reflected to some extent the atmosphere of enthusiasm for Cossackdom on the part of Pol­ish society in the years immediately following the Battle of Khotyn (1621), in which the Cossacks under Sahaidachny’s leadership helped to save the Commonwealth from possible defeat in the conflict with the Ottoman Turks.^[321]

Kasiian Sakovych’s Verses, discussed earlier in this chapter, not only give a good illustration of the efforts of the Orthodox hierarchy to ‘Ruthe- nianize’ the Cossacks but also attest to the formative influence of Sarma­tian ideas and values in establishing the image of Cossackdom within Ruthenian society in the first half of the seventeenth century. One of the characteristic features of the Verses is their consonance with the Sarmat­ian notion of the Christian defensive bastion and their rather pronounced identification with general Christian values and orientations when it comes to combating the ‘infidel’.^[322] In order to stress Sahaidachny’s ser­vices to Christendom, most notably his contribution to the victory at Khotyn, the author of the Verses asserts that Sahaidachny would rather ‘... suffer wounds himself | Than betray Christians to the infidel’. The Verses also indicate Sahaidachny’s role in the liberation of Christian slaves and give an animated account of his attack on Kaffa.

Notwithstanding the general Christian orientation apparent in many lines of the Verses, it should be remembered that they were written by a teacher of an Orthodox collegium at a time of bitter conflict between the new Orthodox hierarchy consecrated with Sahaidachny’s assistance and the Uniate Church supported by the royal administration. Quite natur­ally, Sakovych understood faith in God to mean, first and foremost, loy­alty to the Orthodox Church. Not surprisingly, he dubbed Sahaidachny a ‘true hetman’ in noting his services to Christianity. A quarter-century later, Szymon Starowolski restricted his use of the term ‘true knight’ to the Roman Catholic ‘knights’, while for the Orthodox author of the Verses it was, of course, the Orthodox knight who was the ‘true’ one.

In The True Knight, which Starowolski published in 1648, after the out­break of the Khmelnytsky Uprising and the first defeats of the Polish forces, he divided Christian knights into three categories: ‘true’ knights, that is, Roman Catholics; heretics, or Protestants; and schismatics, or Orthodox. He referred to the latter as renegades or the ‘main enemy’. In this new work of Starowolski’s, the multidenominational Sarmatian warrior of the 1620s and 1630s was clearly transformed into a one- denominational Roman Catholic Polish knight, while the image of the Commonwealth as the defensive bastion of Christianity as a whole turned into one of the Commonwealth as the bastion of Roman Catholi­cism alone. Thus Orthodox Rus’ was easily transformed into the enemy of that bastion, if not entirely supplanting the traditional Muslim threat, then certainly overshadowing it to a very considerable degree.

Starowolski’s ‘confessionalization’ of the image of the ‘true’ knight marked a sharp break with previous efforts on the part of some Polish publicists, including Starowolski himself, to treat the Cossacks above all as fellow Christians. This new tendency was reinforced by the Cossacks’ own stance in defense of Orthodoxy, which impeded any effort to include Cossackdom in a new model of the Polish political nation. No doubt, the change in Starowolski’s views largely reflected the mood of Polish society as a whole. By the 1630s and 1640s, the Khotyn-inspired notions of in­cluding the Cossacks in the Polish nation by means of cultural and social ‘Sarmatization’ had clearly lost support. Starowolski’s attitude reflected the social climate, which was influenced by anti-Polish Cossack upris­ings, the growth of Counter-Reformation influences in the Common­wealth, and the decline of religious toleration.^[323]

By the 1630s and 1640s, not only Starowolski but also the Orthodox advocates of Cossackdom had lost interest in the heroes of Khotyn. The Cossacks’ unwanted interference in the affairs of the restored Kyivan metropolitanate should be listed among the factors that contributed to Kasiian Sakovych’s conversion to the Union and later to Roman Catholi­cism. As noted earlier, Meletii Smotrytsky had also converted to the Union, while Metropolitan Petro Mohyla tried to distance himself from the Cossacks as much as possible. The Orthodox intellectuals no longer advocated the inclusion of Cossackdom in Ruthenian nobiliary society. They also abandoned the project of integrating Cossackdom into a broader Commonwealth political nation, either through Sarmatian ideology or otherwise.

Having adopted an exclusionary denominational character in the sec­ond half of the seventeenth century, Sarmatism could not incorporate Cossackdom into a broader Polish-Lithuanian political nation, but had a considerable influence on the formation of Cossack consciousness and identity and on the development of its values, ideals, and world-view. Sakovych’s emphasis on the special knightly rights of the Cossacks and Starowolski’s inclusion of Cossack leaders among the Sarmatian knights corresponded to the Cossacks’ own aspirations to be included in the circle of nobiliary privilege through their military service and member­ship in the category of knightly men.^[324] The Cossacks’ efforts to establish their ‘knightly’ status may be traced back to the early seventeenth century. As early as 1602, in striving for the restoration of Cossack privi­leges abolished after the Nalyvaiko uprising, the Cossack hetman Ivan Kutskovych noted in his letter that the king, as a protector of knightly men, had granted the Cossacks their ancient liberties—privileges that also applied to their families and properties.^[325] More than a quarter of a century later, in his account of the war of 1630, the author of the Lviv Chronicle made mention of the Cossacks’ special status and the recogni­tion of their knightly virtues by the Poles. Referring to Cossack privileges, he wrote that as a result of the war Hetman Koniecpolski ‘left them [the Cossacks] their cannon and recognized them as Cossacks’, and ‘accorded knightly status’ to the leader of the uprising, Taras Triasylo.^[326]

The royal administration and the noble estate, on the other hand, def­initively rejected all Cossack claims to the rights of the nobility by not al­lowing them to participate in the election of the new king following the death of Zygmunt III. In his account of the response to the Cossack dele­gation in the matter, Albrycht Stanislaw Radziwifl notes that they were ‘roundly cursed for having dared to consider themselves members of the Commonwealth and having demanded the right to vote in the election; the Senate gave them a strict warning not to try it again’.^[327] The Cossacks were obliged to swallow this rejection, but were not content to leave it without a response. In a letter to the election Diet, the new Cossack lead­ership noted that ‘we are not pleased to hear that Your Graces, our Gra­cious Lords, having recognized us as members [equal to you] by the authority of Their Graces the Lords Commissioners of Kurukove, have now decided to keep us at arm’s length when it comes to electing a king’.^[328] Not until December 1632 did the newly elected King Wiadysiaw IV note in a letter to the Cossacks that he had been chosen ‘by the will of God and of all noble residents of the Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania’. He called on the Cossacks to support him ‘with their services and knightly deeds’.^[329] This was scant recompense to the Cossacks after they had been denied the right to take part in the king’s election.

In claiming nobiliary rights, the Cossacks were following the example of the Ruthenian boyars, who had managed to exchange the status of knightly men for that of nobles in the course of the fourteenth and fif­teenth centuries. The Ruthenian boyars were no exception in this re­spect, as the formation of the nobility ‘from below’ through the accretion of knightly warriors was common practice in East Central Europe. In the case of the Cossacks, then, the problem lay not so much in their choice of means of attaining nobiliary privilege as in the obvious mistiming of their attempt. The Cossack initiative was clearly 100—150 years too late: as Natalia Iakovenko has pointed out, the formation of the ruling stratum in Rus' was for the most part complete by the end of the fifteenth century.^[330]

Only a violent revolution could bring about the change in the estab­lished social order desired by the Cossacks. Such a revolution did indeed take place in the mid-seventeenth century: it was the Khmelnytsky Up­rising that allowed Cossackdom to attain fully equal status in its tandem arrangement with the Ruthenian nobility. The new Ukrainian elite arose out of the flames of the Cossack revolution from the ranks of the Cossack officer stratum, which in social terms consisted mainly of representatives of the Cossack elite and Cossackized nobles. According to the terms of the Treaty of Hadiach (1658), which was signed by Hetman Ivan Vy- hovsky and representatives of the Commonwealth, the Cossack elite was to be accorded the status of Polish nobles. Although the Treaty of Hadi- ach never took effect, its provisions testified to the vitality of the concept, developed in the 1620s, of extending the model of the Ruthenian nation in social terms by including the Cossack stratum within its ranks. The Treaty of Hadiach also demonstrated the vitality of another element of the model of the Ruthenian nation that was modified by the Kyivan Orthodox intellectuals—the denominational component. According to the terms of the treaty, it was precisely the one-denominational Orthodox Rus' that became the third partner in the Commonwealth.

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