“Rulers of the Fatherland”: The Hetmanate's Cossack and Church Elite's Concepts of the Nature, Representation, and Obligations of Authority (Up to the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century)

NATALIA IAKOVENKO

Until the appearance of the works of Teofan Prokopovych, Ukrainian political thought had produced no texts that provided a basis for a doctrine of governance on a systemic level.¹ This, of course, did not mean that there were no opinions regarding what “just” rule should be like.

Without dwelling on detailed descriptions of each of the above versions of the perception of authority, allow me to note briefly that the first of them - the “princely” version (it is the earliest to appear in sources and is most likely the specifically “Ruthenian” product of the concepts of the nature of authority as such) - was derived from the dominance, traditional in Ukrainian society, of princely families, among which the Ostroz'kyi family held undisputed first place.

The second of the abovenamed versions of the perception of authority, which can be provisionally called “theocratic,” is documented in the works of the Kyivan clerical circle only as of the beginning of the 1620s. Its characteristic feature is emphasis on the guiding mission of the Orthodox Church in the life of the Ruthenian community - a Church that commands both rich and poor, the high- placed and the common folk, “the princes of this world” included, because, as Kyiv Metropolitan Petro Mohyla will write in the introduction to a 1637 Didactic Gospel: “the emperor's and king's status is very high, but [...] priestly rank takes precedence over the status of the highest placed of this world.”⁴ In seeking the origin of this assertion, which is rather unexpected from the standpoint of hitherto “submissive” Orthodoxy, I believe it is worth comparing the Kyivan “theocratic” formulations with the doctrine of the post-Trent Catholic Church, especially with the works of Roberto Bellarmino and Cesare Baronio: it is these two authors that are perhaps most frequently mentioned by the clerical intellec­tuals of the Kyiv-Mohyla circle.

As for the origins of the third version of the perception of “just” authority, which can be described in a generalized sense as the “Commonwealth” version, it was based on the commonplace idea in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's nobiliary ideology of government as a contract between a “free nation” and the ruler. In light of this idea, any authoritarian rule conducted without the consent and sanction of the “nation” (that is, the nobility) was regarded as “tyranny,” which cast the “yoke of slavery” (jugum servitutis) on the subjects.⁵ Comments that reflect this type of political culture are scattered throughout a wide variety of texts of Ruthenian origin from the end of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth centuries: from religious polemical treatises to dietine instructions, panegyrics, various protests, private letters, Diet speeches, and so forth. One of the most important results of this interpretation of power relations was undoubt­edly the formulation of the idea of the supposedly contractual union of the “Ruthenian nation” with the Polish and Lithuanian nations in the 1569 Union of Lublin as the third, equal and self-sufficient member of the Commonwealth of Two Nations (in his Diet speech in 1641, Adam Kysil' said the following regarding this: “Our ancestors, the Ruthenian Sarmatians, voluntarily came to your Graces' ancestors, the Polish Sarmatians [...]; not to a religion, but with a religion, not to titles and honors, but with titles and honors - that is how we came to our com­mon Fatherland.”⁶

Not everything from this briefly described legacy of concepts of “just” authority was adopted by the Cossack and Orthodox clerical milieu that after the wars and cataclysms of the mid-seventeenth century began its history from a blank page - with new ideological priorities and new heroes, and, last but not least, in a new state, whose structure and system of governance differed funda­mentally from their preceding fatherland.⁷ In particular, the “princely” version of the concept of authority had fallen into decline by the beginning of the Khmel'nyts'kyi period, as a result of both the extinction of the Ostroz'kyi line and the fact that their heirs, the Zaslavs'kyi princes, had become as of the mid- 1620s the de facto protectors of the Uniate Church - that is, had moved away from the “true Rus'” in the eyes of the Kyiv-Mohyla intellectuals.

In contrast to the first two, the third version of the concept of “just” authority, which was based on the political rhetoric of the “gentry nation” of the Common­wealth, demonstrated amazing staying power in lasting, mutatis mutandis, from the birth of Cossack intellectual activity at the beginning of the eighteenth century until the complete demise of the Hetmanate. The final replication of this view of authority was the Istoriia Rusov (The History of the Rus' People), an anonymous chronicle from the beginning of the nineteenth century.¹⁰ To a certain extent, this is the model that can serve as a kind of general framework for the reflections that will be examined in greater detail below. However, the Commonwealth nobiliary idea of democracy became overgrown in the Cossack polity by a very character­istic accumulation of details that lead us, as will be shown later, to a more archaic layer of concepts of the nature of authority, its obligations, and expected forms of representation. Thus, we have before us a rather complicated balancing be­tween, on the one hand, a clearly defined continuation of the Commonwealth ideal of political culture and a corresponding rhetoric of “golden liberties,” and, on the other hand, the emerging image of a new, purely Cossack formula of a “just” authority, which will be the subject of our discussion.

My observations are based on the reflections of the residents of the Hetmanate on authority and hetman rule, which are scattered throughout contemporary historiographic works, panegyrics, sermons, verses, letters, and so forth.

“Division of powers” between the Anointed Sovereign and the Hetman

It is worthwhile to begin by recalling those unalterable postulates in the concept of authority that were formulated by Christian doctrine on the basis of the famous passage in Paul to the Romans: “Let everyone be subject to the governing author­ities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The author­ities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves” (Romans 13:1-2). This dictum, as we know, became part of Christian teaching and transformed the obedience of subjects into a duty to God. The precedent from Sacred history, wherein the first Judaic kings Saul and David were chosen by God himself, who then ordered the prophet to anoint them to rule over “His heritage,” made the authority of the anointed sovereign an instrument of Providence to protect the God-given order.

The reflections of Ukrainian sermonizers and members of ecclesiastical circles on the nature of the authority of the anointed sovereign are based on these bib­lical postulates. For example, loanykii Galiatovs'kyi defines authority in the words of the Apostle Paul (“there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist are ordained of God”); he formulates the virtue of obedi­ence of “lesser people to rulers” and the obligations of the “rulers” before God “for their servitors and subjects” according to the same parameters.¹¹ We en­counter the same idea in the sermons of Antonii Radyvylovs'kyi, wherein the focus of attention is on the divinely ordained submission to the anointed sovereign, inasmuch as he “bears the image of God, bears the person of Christ” (compare, inter alia, the use in one of the sermons of the exemplum of the “noble Venetian senator” who refused to kneel before his son when the latter was elected prince until he was convinced that his son “bears the person of Christ”).¹² Ac­cording to Lazar Baranovych, the tsar is under the direct supervision of God: “God holds the tsar's heart in his hand, / nor does he relinquish his hold on the apple of the tsar's eye.”¹³ Having received authority from God, the anointed sovereign personifies divine presence on earth, and, consequently, is the guar­antee of the well-being of his subjects:

When God is with us, what worries can we have?

As God seated you on the tsar's throne,

So he will take care of your crown

And give counsel about everything, and counsel is not the betrayal,

Of God, but rather it is protection and defense.¹⁴

In secular eyes, the anointed ruler is also the bearer of divine sanction and an instrument of higher justice; what is more, these attributes are applied equally to both the former sovereign, the Catholic king, and to the current ruler, the Or­thodox tsar. Here is a characteristic example from the Hrabianka Chronicle, which (it is worthwhile emphasizing) stands out for its especially harsh anti-Polish and anti-Catholic attacks. According to Hrabianka, Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi after the appropriate ceremonies in the act of signing the Treaty of Zboriv in 1649: will go to the King, sitting on his illustrious throne, and pay his obeisance, saying: “Not in this way, with this assembled Host, did I should have wel­comed Your Royal Majesty, which has happened more by chance than through my fault, for which let me be forgiven: but I confess I am not worthy of mercy, but it is characteristic of both God Himself and his vicar of Christ to be merciful toward the submissive: He does not scorn a contrite heart.” To this the Lithuanian deputy chancellor replied: “[...] The most illustrious King. with his mercy heals liked a physician, like the sun enlightens both good and bad, so the Monarch is best when he protects the citizens, forgives the meek and rebellious.¹⁵

In the described model of supreme authority as sanctioned by God through the act of consecration (anointment) in the coronation ritual, or in the Russian case, through the procedure of the crowning of the tsar, there was no place for uncrowned individuals.¹⁶ However, after the emergence of the Cossack state, in which Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi established his autocratic rule, there were recorded attempts (from the beginning of 1649, according to Serhii Plokhy's observations) to give the hetmancy a sacralized substance with the help of rhetorical, ideological, and diplomatic means, which transformed the hetman's rule, secured “by the sword,” into authority bestowed by God.¹⁷ In Plokhy's opinion, the main role in this was played by the church hierarchs, who consecrated the hetman's regalia and honored Khmel'nyts'kyi's name in church services, although a number of actions attributed to the higher clergy (for example, the “coronation” of the het­man) can be regarded as most likely the product of rumors.¹⁸ Alongside the ec­clesiastical perception of the hetman, we also come across the secular image of the hetman in the concepts of divine election, evidenced by the addition to the hetman's title of the formula “by the grace of God.”¹⁹ Finally, we have direct ev­idence of these processes in the famous celebratory welcome given Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi as he entered Kyiv at the beginning of January 1649, when, ac­cording to an eyewitness account described by Wojciech Miaskowski:

Effusus populus, tota plebs witala go w polu i Academia oracjami, akkla- macjami, tamquam Moijsem, servatorem, liberatorem populi de servitute Lechica, et bono omin^ Bohdan, od Boga dany, nazwany [The whole people, all the commoners came out of the city to greet him, and the Academy wel­comed him with orations and exclamations as Moses, deliverer, savior, lib­erator of the nation from Polish bondage, auspiciously named Bohdan, the God-given one].²⁰

The “good omen” (bonum omen) referred to in the above episode was inter­preted in verses in the fall of 1649, which were appended to the Register of the Zaporozhian Host, as the blessing of the Holy Spirit (“It is no wonder, because the Holy Spirit makes Bohdan wise”), and the author of the verses explicitly equates the hetman's power with that of the king:

The king is God's anointed one, and Bohdan is given

By God, hence named Bohdan [the God-given one] (...)

Where King Casimir is the ruler in Poland,

In Rus' there is Hetman Khmel'nyts'kyi Bohdan.²¹

This “division of authority” between the hetman and the anointed ruler (Serhii Plokhy calls this a ‘duumvirate' or, more precisely, the idea of it), does not disap­pear even after the death of Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi; we find references to most hetmancies as to acts of divine election.²² Thus, according to the apocryphal cor­respondence of the hetmans with the Zaporozhian Host contained in the Velychko Chronicle, even the election to the hetmancy of Velychko's hated Ivan Vyhovs'kyi is attributed to the “all-wise care of God,” and Petro Doroshenko, whose assess­ment by the author is very mixed, defines his post (“condition”) as given him by God (obviously, in Velychko's words, because also in an apocryphal letter).²³ “Kish hetman by the grace of God” is the title that Ivan Briukhovets'kyi gives himself even before his election to the hetmancy;²⁴ in the eyes of Lazar Baranovych, Ivan Samoilovych is the God-given hetman: the hierarch wishes that he should long wield the “hetman's mace and [guide] the building of Orthodox Ruthenianism [pravoslavnorosiiskim] that has been entrusted to you by God, as by the sunlit sky.” Ivan Velychkovs'kyi addresses Samoilovych in his panegyric in similar fash­ion: “by the grace of God given you / you know how to establish peace in your beloved fatherland / (...) God in one Trinity gave you the one mace.”²⁵ The Chernihiv panegyrist Ivan Ornovs'kyi calls Ivan Mazepa a hetman “by the grace of heaven”; Prokopovych writes of Mazepa being entrusted with the “building of this fatherland. after the tsar from God” in his famous “tragicomedy” Vladimir, performed at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in honor of Mazepa's visit to the school in 1705; and in an anonymous verse on the Poltava bell, cast in 1695, we read the following: “During the rule of Russian tsars Peter and John, / During the het­mancy of Mazepa, given by God.”²⁶

Finally, from the introduction dedicated to Samoilovych, contained in Ioanykii Galiatovs'kyi's Skarbnitsapotrebnaia ipozhit chnaia (Kyiv, 1676), we can see how his contemporaries imagined the “mechanism of the division” of divine right to rule between the anointed tsar and the hetman: “from whose [Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich - N. Ia.] scepter-bearing hand your Highness received the hetman's mace, ascending to the office of hetman at God's call and with God's elevation, according to the Apostle Paul, who said: “For no one accepts honor, but is named by God.”²⁷

Thus the symbol of authority - the mace - is given to the hetman by the anointed ruler, but, essentially, his function appears to be that of an “intermedi­ary,” because the hetman has already been selected and designated by his “eleva­tion” by God himself. But in that case how are the purely earthly powers divided, and what part of them belongs to the tsar and what part to the hetman? The texts that I have analyzed allow us to assume that there existed a marked difference be­tween the concept of the scope of the tsar's functions among the Cossack starshyna and the views of tsarist authority held by the clerical intellectuals of the Kyiv- Mohyla circle. For the latter, whose knowledge of the tradition of interpreting supreme authority had a Byzantine literary foundation - for example, knowledge of the Nomocanon, wherein the emperor is the orderer and patron of the Church (on the eve of the Khmel'nyts'kyi period, the Kyivan Cave Monastery Press pub­lished the Nomocanon three times: in 1620, 1624, and 1629), or through such read­ing matter as the famous exhortations of Deacon Agapetus addressed to Emperor Justinian, published for the first time in a Slavic language by this press in 1628 - the person of the tsar was associated primarily with divine authority (“vested with authority, like God”), called upon to mediate between God and the people.²⁸ On the other hand, the figure of the tsar was “brought down to earth,” as it were, by the “cultural” duties with which he was charged: he had to be educated, moral, filled with concern for good customs and the eradication of injustice, and so forth. These subtleties of the anointed sovereign's ruling functions drew the attention of the Ukrainian ecclesiastical community throughout the seventeenth century. It is impossible not to recall that the first Ukrainian translation of the so-called Testament of Emperor Basil I the Macedonian, a Byzantine literary monument from the end of the ninth century, which stresses precisely these aspects of the ars regnandi (art of ruling), was made by Damian Nalyvaiko and published by the Ostroh Press in 1607, while the first and second Moscow editions (ca. 1661­63 and 1680) were prepared, with the accuracy of the translation checked, by grad­uates of the Kyiv-Mohyla College lepyfanii Slavynets'kyi and Symeon Polots'kyi.²⁹ The Testament (the Ostroh edition) was used by Petro Mohyla as evidenced by his handwritten notes in the book.³⁰ In the opinion of Giovanna Brogi Bercoff, this same literary monument is quoted by Dymytrii Tuptalo in the introduction to his Litopisets (admittedly, from Baronio) as being in accordance with his con­cept of the ideal ruler.³¹

Both incarnations of the tsar (as a sacred being through whom the heavenly protection of the territory and its subjects is realized and as a person endowed with the highest Christian virtues) are present in the Ukrainian texts of church authors of the second half of the seventeenth century. “Like the sun, his throne shone for God and for our needs,” wrote Lazar Baranovych in 1676 in the mourn­ful panegyric on the death of Aleksei Mikhailovich.³² This solar symbol gives rise to characteristics that attest to the anointed ruler's zealousness in serving God and protecting the highest justice on earth: he shines “in truth, like the sun”; he has “built and beautified churches” and has “himself served God excellently”; he is the bearer of “many riches, which he generously lavished on everybody”; he is “wise, good, devout”; he “looks kindly, like a father, upon his subjects”; he is re­spectful in his attitude toward the clergy and compassionate to the lame and downtrodden; he models his conduct on his Christ-loving ancestors (“being equal to Saint Volodymyr, Tsar Constantine, Princes Hlib and Borys”).³³

Baranovych's array of the tsar's virtues encompasses, as we can see, the cus­tomary canon of the “professional ethics” of a Christian ruler, established by numerous “mirrors for princes” - from Deacon Agapetus to the relevant seven­teenth-century treatises, in which piety, wisdom, magnanimity, kindness, mercy (pietas,prudentia, magnanimitas, dementia, misericordia), and so forth appear in various combinations. On the other hand, it is no use looking in texts of the pan­egyric genre, even if written by church intellectuals, for such an abundance of a tsar's virtues, and especially “cultural” duties: the authors confine themselves to the polite mention of the tsar as “most illustrious and pious.” A telling example from this standpoint is the Kroinika o Rusi (Chronicle of Rus') by the hegumen of St Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery Feodosii Sofonovych, written at the be­ginning of the 1670s. Thus, while the author reserves at least some elements of “professional ethics” for the Polish kings (for example, Wladyslaw IV is described as “good-hearted” and John Casimir as “merciful”), he is obviously at a loss about what to do with Aleksei Mikhailovich, confining himself to consistently adding the epithet “Orthodox” to all mentions of the tsar.³⁴

The figure of the tsar is drawn even more schematically in the texts of secular authors. For example, in Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi's diplomatic correspondence, he appears as an abstraction of a “pious tsar,” who is called upon to protect the threatened Orthodox faith.³⁵ After the Pereiaslav Agreement, the allegory of the “wings of protection” of the Orthodox tsar over the Zaporozhian Host and all of “Little Rus'” entered into circulation. In analyzing the divergent interpretations of the metaphor of the “wings” by the Ukrainian and Russian sides, Serhii Plokhy calls the metaphor “solemn rhetoric,” but does not discuss the rhetorical model that was the foundation of the different nuance in the Ukrainian understanding of this generality.³⁶ However, there is no doubt that this was a matter of the conventional patron-client topos, that is, a model of the authority-subordination relationships that were ubiquitous in the social practices of the Commonwealth. We find the rhetoric of patronage (“roof” and “wings” of the patron's protection, the familial metaphor of the “father-children” relationship between the patron and his clients, the antithesis “patronage-allegiance”) in countless texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When we take this into account, the seman­tics of the fact that the residents of the Hetmanate usually qualify the act of placing their polity under the suzerainty of the Russian tsar as a move “under the pro­tection,” and not as subordination, become much clearer, even though in personal situations the Cossack starshyna call themselves “subjects” of the tsar. The passage in the Eyewitness Chronicle, which states that “the Cossacks... swore an oath of eternal subjugation allegiance [poddanstvo] to his tsarist majesty,” is rather an ex­ception, because the concept of subjugation itself was subject to harsh condem­nation.³⁷ For example, the loyal Hrabianka often identifies it with a “yoke of labor,” namely slavery, and Samiilo Velychko, in the apocryphal letter that the Zaporozhi- ans allegedly wrote to Hetman Ivan Samoilovych on 4 April 1684, calls the inten­tion attributed to Samoilovych “to make [Ukraine] subject” to the tsar a crime, which will destroy forever: “the glory and dignity of the military. which every good and virtuous ancestor of Ukrainians and fine fellows of the Zaporozhian Host, and our whole fatherland of Little Russian Ukraine [Malaia Ukraina Mal- orosiiskaia] does not want to allow.³⁸

On the other hand, protection in contrast to subjugation was perceived as the free choice of ruler - with contractually established mutual obligations of the patron-monarch and Host-servitor.³⁹ Perhaps the best illustration of this are the arguments in Pylyp Orlyk's famous letter to Stefan lavors'kyi of 1721: having finally decided to switch to the side of Charles XII, Ivan Mazepa allegedly ordered Orlyk to:

write a letter to His Tsarist Excellency [expressing] gratefulness for his pro­tection [...] In conclusion, to declare that we had acquiesced voluntarily to the sovereignty of His Tsarist Majesty for the sake of the unified Eastern Or­thodox faith. Being a free people, we now wish freely to withdraw, expressing gratitude for the Tsar's protection [.] Under the protection of the Swedish king, we will look forward to our complete liberation.⁴⁰

Mazepa's motivation (in Orlyk's interpretation) is the same as the motivation that Samiilo Velychko attributes to the iconic leader Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi: in 1652, the latter supposedly proposed peace to the king, “and if it should be otherwise, he would have to apply to another neighboring monarch for defense and protection.”⁴¹ The cautious warning was not heeded: the hetman's envoys returned from the king “with nothing,” and that in Velychko's concept of authority­subordination opened the path to a legitimate change of patron.

The most important thing for us in the subjugation-protection antithesis is that the first was associated with the exercise of direct authority over the territory and its population, and the second, with patronage, which did not envisage such authority, inasmuch as it belonged to the “servant” of the patron based on the old feudal tradition of rex in regno suo imperator est (the king is emperor in his own realm). In this system of concepts, the ruling function of the anointed sovereign was confined to protection (“wings of protection”) and joint defensive operations (“alliance”), and, according to Velychko, it was these two concepts that Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi invoked in explaining his choice in 1654: “to be in alliance with and under the protection of the divinely powerful Orthodox monarch.”⁴² It remains to recall that this perception of tsarist authority was fundamentally dif­ferent from the concepts of it in contemporary Russia, where, according to re­searchers, it represented not only a higher sacred value (we also see replicas of this, derived from the Christian teaching about “worldly powers,” in Ukraine), but also the omnipresent and all-pervading authority of the “earthly god,” who has power of life and death over his subjects on the same basis as God.”⁴³

The powers of the real ruler of Ukraine, the hetman, in the eyes of his subjects also owed, as already noted, to divine election, but this deification was, as it were, of a “formal” nature: the hetman was regarded as God-given only to the extent that in principle “there is no authority except from God.” Nor can it be ruled out that the hetman acquired a certain amount of sacrum as the partner of the “God- crowned” tsar. For example, we come across this nuance in Stefan lavors'kyi's panegyric in honor of Ivan Mazepa: according to the lavors'kyi formula, Mazepa is enlightened by the “ray of sunlight... of Russian autocrats” (“slonecznypromien... Jedynowladcow Rosskich”).⁴⁴ At the same time, the right of the hetman to the fullness of real authority over the territory and population of the Hetmanate was not in any doubt, and in these collisions he was described with the help of defi­nitions of the sovereign ruler. Here are two consonant examples, from panegyrics to Ivan Samoilovych (1687) and his successor, Ivan Mazepa (1688):

Szlachetnej mlodzi grono wiec wspaniale,

Bo ma patrona i fundusze cale.

Ktoz wzdy jest janem, onego mianuje,

W Rusi panuje?⁴⁵

A gdy pod madrym rzadem Twej bulawy Rossijski narod tej sie dopnie slawy.. d⁶

The circle of noble youth is so great,

Because it has a patron and all funds.

Who is jan by name,

[He] rules in Rus'?

And where under the wise rule of Your mace

the Ruthenian people will gain glory.

However, sovereign authority was associated not only with rights but also with obligations; they were symbolized by the virtues envisaged by the above­mentioned “professional ethics” of the anointed ruler. We come across combina­tions of such virtues time after time in the characterizations of hetmans provided by their contemporaries. Setting aside “valor” and “courage” (virtus and fortitudo) as obvious attributes of every military leader, I will deal with the hetman's “wis­dom” (prudentia) and “magnanimity” (magnanimitas), traits that closely echo the Commonwealth political tradition of what was expected of royal rule.⁴⁷ Both qualities (the first was identified with “justice” and the second, with “nobility of soul”) anticipated serving the public good as values that the ruler must place higher than his private interests. Accusations against heedless hetmans - not “builders and protectors,” but “monsters of the fatherland,” who take one action or another “for the sake of their own private interests and ambitions, and not for the public good,” “for their private interests,” “with considerable damage to the fatherland... for their own love of power, private and insatiable desires,” “them­selves choosing to live in riches, while not taking care of the Host and of human misery,” “only those private interests lead them astray, so that they chase after the hetmancy,” and so forth - are a semantic cliche repeated so often that it hardly seems possible to doubt that the most widespread view of the hetman was pri­marily as the protector of the “public good.”⁴⁸ The characteristic nuances in the oath that Ivan Mazepa allegedly swore before Pylyp Orlyk just before switching to Charles XII's side indicate the same perception of the hetman's role:

I swear before God that it is not for my own private gain, nor for higher honors, nor for greater wealth, nor for any other reasons that I act. But I do so for all of you who are under my rule and command, for your wives and children, for the common welfare of our fatherland, poor unfortunate Ukraine, for the entire Zaporozhian Host and the Little Russian people, for the elevation and expansion of the Host's rights and privileges so that, with the aid of God, neither you, nor your wives and children nor the fatherland together with the Zaporozhian Host might perish because of Moscow or the Swedes.⁴⁹

In addition to devotion to the public good, other actions and traits befitting a ruler's “professional ethics” were expected of the hetman. In particular, he had to demonstrate “piety” (pietas), that is, he had to respect the men of the Church, build churches, and spread Christian “teachings” among his subjects. It is in this guise that Ivan Samoilovych appears in Ivan Velychkovs'kyi's panegyric:

That [mace - N. la.] led [you] to build churches

And decorate them with icons.

That [mace] causes you to love scholars,

And be a special patron of the sciences,

From which stem the glory, adornment, and support

Of our beloved fatherland and forthcoming joy.⁵⁰

The ruler had to be “generous”: this trait is an element of the already mentioned magnanimitas (magnanimity) - in the sense of being open to the difficulties and needs of every subject (we will deal later with “generosity” toward the troops, a virtue of a different order). An example of praise of such “generosity” was the panegyric of the “magister of grammar” of the Kyiv-Mohyla College Pavlo Baranets'kyi's Tribute to his excellency Mr. Ivan Samoilovych (Trybut jasnie wiel- moznemu jmci Panu Janowi Samojlowiczowi; 1687):

Ile przeszlych wiekow, ile przydzie,

Na szczodrocie wzdy Ianowej nie zydzie,

Aby zloty wiek i dobroc odmienil,

Slawe przemienil.

Doznali tego nietylko rossyjscy,

Ale mieszkancy swiadomi azyjscy,

Jak dobrotliwy jestes w laskawosci,

Z wlasnej milosci.⁵¹

How many centuries in the past, how many in the future,

[he] would not already have lived on great generosity

That to change the golden age and welfare,

To change the glory.

Not only the Ruthenians,

But Asian residents are aware,

How great your kindness is,

Without being forced.

Finally, a good Christian ruler had to have such traits as liberalitas and sim­plicitas (“liberality” and “simplicity”) in his way of life and attitude to his subjects, as well as openness to consilium, that is, to counsel. And we find these traits in re­flections about Ivan Samoilovych, although in a negative sense:

At first you were a good master to all,

Then you start behaving in a proud way,

You began to rule single-handedly,

You forgot that you were elected because of love

And named our senior lord,

You no longer needed any counsel,

And you thought that you had come down from heaven...

And you held everybody for nothing

And they were degraded to footstools.⁵²

A similar example of being “spoiled by power” of the initially “humane” and later “proud” Samoilovych is depicted in the Eyewitness Chronicle. It is worth adding that this contrast has a rhetorical derivation: “pride” (superbia) is the an­tithesis of “humility” (humilitas) and “generosity” (liberalitas):

That priest's son was at first very humble and kind toward people, but when he grew rich, he became very proud not only toward the Cossacks but also toward the clerical estate. When the Cossack officers came to him, they had to stand, nobody sat. the clergy, too, no matter how eminent, had to stand with an uncovered head. And in church, he never walked to receive the Gifts, but the priest brought them to him, and his sons did the same.⁵³

I should add in passing that the “standing before the hetman” described in the Eyewitness Chronicle is most likely an allusion to the popular work by Suetonius, The Lives of Twelve Caesars, which was often used as a literary model: according to Suetonius, one of the cruelest Roman emperors, Caligula, forced the senators to stand in his presence and even wait on him at table (Suetonius, De Vita, IV, 26.2). The “imperial” parallel in the depiction of Samoilovych's crimes here is rather telling from the standpoint of the perception of the status of the hetman's authority. Closer to reality is the passage about bringing the Holy Gifts to the hetman and his sons. It cannot be ruled out that this was an echo of reports of solemn liturgies celebrated by Eastern hierarchs in which Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi and his sons participated. One of them (in Chyhyryn, on 8 November 1650) is mentioned by the Muscovite monk Arsenii Sukhanov. According to him, fol­lowing a prayer at the pulpit, metropolitans Joasaph of Corinth and Gabriel of Nazareth came away from the altar through the royal doors to the hetman and the hetman's son (Tymish?) and then placing their omophorions on their heads, they read prayers.⁵⁴

On the whole, as we can see from the cited examples, in applying the array of virtues of the “crowned” ruler to the ruling hetman, the inhabitants of the Het- manate essentially equated the ars regnandi of the two. This meant that, on the one hand, they recognized the hetman's right to the fullness of ruling powers, and, on the other hand, they limited these powers with a certain “level of expec­tations” from government as such. After all, for practically every virtue from the stereotypical canon, it is possible to find not only praise but also a negative par­allel, and it is these opposites of “good-bad” hetmans that represent a concentrated cross-section of concepts about “just” rule.

The Hetman and the “People”

Describing the “election” of Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi at the Zaporozhian Sich on the eve of the uprising, Samiilo Velychko uses the following expression: “Then immediately, with one voice and one heart, the whole Host named and decreed Khmel'nyts'kyi to be their hetman.”⁵⁵

The formula “with one voice and one heart” is a direct analogue of the famous unanimo consensu (“by unanimous consent”), the principle that was one of the chief doctrines of the political system of the Commonwealth. “Unanimity” was associated with the concept of the “equality” (aequalitas) of the noble nation. Besides symbolic connotations, this also had purely technical parameters - the election of the king viritim, that is, with the votes of all the nobles present at the election in person, and the approval of Diet decisions not by a majority of the vote but by means of zgody spolnej, that is, unanimously.⁵⁶

Velychko also contains frequent invocations of the “nation” as sovereign, to whom belongs the summapotestas in the state, which is also congruent with the Commonwealth doctrine of authority, and in another apocryphal letter from the Zaporozhians to Ivan Vyhovs'kyi, praising his election to the hetmancy “by the will of the people,” which the Zaporozhians ostensibly approved, although they did not take part in the election, is further reinforced by the trite topos of Commonwealth gentry democracy: “The voice of the people is the voice of God” (voxpopuli - vox Dei).⁵⁷

Thus, at first glance, what we have before us is the Cossack version of the no­biliary concepts of the “sovereignty of the people,” where the place of the “noble nation” has been taken by a new political force - Cossackdom. It is telling that there is no single image of the “Cossack nation” as yet: in Velychko, the “core” and “honor” of Cossackdom is the Zaporozhian Sich; in the Hrabianka and Eyewitness Chronicles, it is the starshyna of the town Cossacks; in the Dvoretskyi Chronicle, it is the “full Council” of the Zaporozhian and town Cossacks; and so forth, al­though this variation in concepts does not change the model of “people's rule” as such.⁵⁸ However, when we examine this model more closely, we will find that the similarity of Cossack and Commonwealth “democracies” is more the product of a common rhetorical canon for describing these concepts than a similarity in their substance.

It is worth beginning with the above-mentioned “unanimous consent” in the election of the hetman and in deciding other matters, inasmuch as this is precisely what is identified in historiography with the “democratic principles of the mili­tary-political system” of Cossackdom, developed at the Zaporozhian Sich, which Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi called the “Ukrainian plebeian republic.”⁵⁹ However, even the first known description of the Sich Council in 1594, written by an eyewitness, the Austrian diplomat Erich Lassota von Steblau, shows not so much “direct democracy” organized on the principles of “unanimous consent,” as the archaic military community, whose “electoral” conduct echoes the customs of ancient Germans described as far back as by Caesar. There, dissenters were regarded as “deserters and traitors” and were killed (Caes. B.G., 6: 23), while here they were threatened with drowning if they failed to show submission to the community.⁶⁰ The same portrayal of the Cossack council appears in much later works: for ex­ample, the “black” (that is, general) council (chorna rada) of 1663 described in the Eyewitness Chronicle, where “many notable Cossacks were killed by the com­mon masses (chern ) in a slaughter that lasted three days.”⁶¹

As for the dependence of the “unanimously elected” hetmans on the “nation” that had given them power, it, too, was very far from the democratic practices on the Commonwealth model. In that model, speaking against the king was re­garded as a regular feature of public life based on the principle of a nobleman's “free voice” (libera vox), but the person of the king acquired a sacred dimension from the moment of his anointment and coronation and was respected as invi- olable.⁶² In contrast, the hetman, although his functions after the creation of the Hetmanate were virtually identical to the functions of a sovereign ruler, was viewed as a figure whom the “nation,” that is, the Zaporozhian Host, had the right to remove from power, and even punish with death for “ruinous rule in our fa­therland.” In one of Velychko's regular apocryphal letters, the Sich Cossacks ex­pressed their complaints against lurii Khmel'nyts'kyi in literally such terms and threatened him:

in the center of Chyhyryn... to throw you out as a worthless leech [...] and if you do not leave Chyhyryn, we will soon come to you and not only bring down the walls of your house, for being a rapist and wrecker of our father­land, but also not leave your soul to live.⁶³

According to Velychko, similar threats were allegedly addressed to Ivan Samoilovych in 1678:

Know for certain that soon there will befall you what you don't expect, be­cause you will pay for the blood of our brothers with your blood or that of your children; for the loss of many of our brothers, ruin will befall your home suddenly; [...] and because through your fault our Little Russian fa­therland on this side [sehobochnaia; Right-Bank Ukraine] has become empty, your rising house will become empty, and there will be nothing living in your dwellings.⁶⁴

Without Velychko's grandiloquence but with a similar subtext of guilt-deserved punishment, other Cossack chroniclers wrote of the killing of “bad” leaders by the Host. For example, one such notable “bad” figure in the narratives about the beginning of the war in 1648 was Cherkasy colonel Barabash, who, according to legend, kept secret the privilege granted by Wladyslaw IV to the Zaporozhian Host: he was executed in the spring of 1648 together with several other officers who did not support the uprising.⁶⁵ The author of the Eyewitness Chronicle de­scribes the death of Barabash with impassive neutrality: “And the troops that were sailing in boats on the Dnipro, [...] the [Cossack] officers that were with them, and the German infantry, which was in boats, they killed and threw into the Dnipro.”⁶⁶ Under Hrabianka's pen, this episode acquires a “patriotic” motivation: Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi allegedly addressed the registered Cossacks, headed by Barabash, through an envoy and reminded them that they, like the rebels, “were born of one mother, Ukraine,” and they, “listened and all six thousand of them rose up with one heart and one mind,” killed Barabash, “and drowned all the of­ficers and Polish commanders with their banners in the Dnipro.”⁶⁷ Velychko, for his part, “legitimized” the event with the will of the “nation”: according to him, Khmel'nyts'kyi, having written Barabash a warning letter in the name of the Za- porozhian Host, accused him of not caring “about our Ukrainian people” and concludes that he should “command sheep or pigs, not people”; a few months later, Barabash met a deserved death: he was “killed” and his allies were “slaugh­tered and thrown into the bowels of the Dnipro.”⁶⁸

We find similar judgmental overtones in the mentions of yet another death of a “bad” hetman - Ivan Briukhovets'kyi, torn to pieces by a Cossack mob in June 1668. This event gets a brief mention in the Eyewitness Chronicle: “The holota [common Cossacks] arbitrarily killed and tortured Briukhovets'kyi in the field and they killed many noted Cossacks and Zaporozhians.”⁶⁹ Hrabianka accom­panies this episode with a short moral on the inevitability of God's retribution: “him the common Cossacks (chern') beat to death without mercy. Thus God avenged the innocent blood of Somko and others on Briukhovets'kyi.”⁷⁰ Velychko, too, “put the onus” on God's vengeance: “began tearing and beating him, and beat him to death... and leaving his dead and naked body, they returned to their camp. [...] And thus it was measured back again to him, Briukhovets'kyi, for shedding the blood of [lakym] Somko and Onykii [Sylych] his own blood had to be shed by his people and his life taken.”⁷¹

It seems to be an important detail that not only is there no condemnation in any of the cited descriptions of either the direct threats to the “heedless ruler,” or of his physical destruction, but, on the contrary, they are represented as something completely legitimate - determined either by the requirements of the public good, or the just retribution for innocently shed blood. From this standpoint, the above­mentioned “divine election” of hetmans proves to be a very ambivalent phe­nomenon. This is because, on the one hand, in electing a hetman, the “nation” (Zaporozhian Host) is merely implementing God's will, which has already “des­ignated” a candidate, while, on the other hand, this same “nation” has the right to execute the chosen one, and this is perceived as a legitimate action, tantamount to carrying out God's judgment. It can be cautiously assumed that this ambiva­lence was rooted in the archaic concept of the nature and functions of authority as the realization of the collective will of a given community of fighting men, under the firm protection of “their” deity (as time went by, a Christian deity, of course). The bearer of authority in this kind of collective had to be perceived, above all, as authorized by the community (thus, also, its deity!) to execute con­crete functions, and, if he neglected to do so, as someone who had profaned the will of the deity and had to be expelled from the community. The idea that the tie between the collective (army) and a higher force was imagined as almost lit­erally direct is suggested by two known statements from the times of the Cossack war, both recorded from the lips of rank-and-file Cossacks and not the starshyna, “spoiled” by familiarity with literary convention, which makes these observations especially credible. The first of these statements is the testimony of a captured Cossack, who in his interrogation in July 1648 repeated the rumors spread among the rebels alleging that Wladyslaw IV had not died but had fled to the Cossack Host. In our camp, said the captive, there are three permanently standing tents: one for God, the second for the king, and the third for the hetman.⁷² The second statement is recorded in the testimony of a registered Cossack: describing one of the Cossack “black” councils in 1651, the captive attributes to the common Cos­sacks (chern ) present at the council the telling paired formula “God and the Host want it so”:

Co czern miedzy sie rozebrawszy krzykn^li: “Panie Hetmanie! Bog i Wojsko tak chce, abysmy sie zadnym sposobem z Krolem nie jednali, bo na tosmy sie odwazyli i na tosmy tu przyszli... tedy my przy dostojenstwie twojem wszytcy ginac bedziemy, i albo wszytcy zginiemy, albo wszytkich Lachow wygubimy.⁷³

That the chern ', having worked it out, shouted: “Lord Hetman! God and the Host want it so, that we not unite with the King in any way, because we dared this and decided [.] then we will all die with your grace, and either we will all die, or we will kill all the Poles.

Finally, a characteristic parallel to the concept of the army as an integral unit whose collective will is equal to the highest verdict is a sentence from Jan Poczobut Odlanicki's soldier's diary. He describes the execution in 1662 - in the name of the army - of the Lithuanian field hetman Wincenty Gosiewski: “I tak zatrzy- mawszy lektyke rozkazali wysiasc z wozu, powiadajac krotka a straszna oracyja, ze calego wojska jest wola taka, abys juz wiecej W.M. nie zyl [And so stopping the litter, they ordered him to get off, [and] delivered a brief and terrible decla­ration that it is the will of the whole army that W.M. no longer should live].”⁷⁴ It is important that the formula used by Poczobut “the will of the whole army” was, apparently, an established cliche, because the author of the diary did not person­ally witness the scene he described.

Given this kind of perception of authority - as tantamount to the will of the armed collective - it is logical to expect that the forms of its direct, as it were, ob­vious representation should coincide primarily with purely soldierly values. Their canon is not difficult to recreate from countless relevant statements, from ancient authors to seventeenth-century texts: the leader has to be willing to fight, just in the distribution of the spoils of war, generous and accessible to his soldiers, and attentive to the “eye appeal” of his army - its weapons, attire, and banners. Before citing examples from works produced within the Cossack milieu, let me under­score a telling detail of a more general nature, namely: the authors depict the virtues of “professional ethics” of the hetmans and the virtues of the military canon asymmetrically - the first are usually only declared, with no specific evi­dence provided, while the latter are always described as completely specific, emo­tionally convincing images or “facts.” A good example of this rhetorical technique is Velychko's visual metaphor, which emotionally emphasizes the “non-combative nature” of Ivan Samoilovych, which is absurd from the standpoint of the expected “bellicosity” of the hetmans: “He loves to rule as hetman but does not want to climb out from his soft feather bed, like a rat, and take up arms in defense of the fatherland from the Crimean wolves; were not our hetmans and leaders of the Zaporozhian Host on this side of the Dnipro such [men] from long ago and up to now?”⁷⁵

Not clearly articulated but decisive in the competition of the contenders for the favor of the Zaporozhian Host was the postulate that a “good” hetman is one “whom the whole Host loves.”⁷⁶ Samiilo Velychko's emphasis on “evidence” of a just distribution of the spoils of war, gestures of munificence toward the Host and its external splendor, acquired as a result of a “successful” hetmancy, show that this “love” was rooted in the ancient link between the well-being of the military collective and the success (“happiness”) and generosity of the leader.⁷⁷ Given the asymmetrical nature of the above description, it is telling that episodes that reflect this type of concept are always reinforced by Velychko with “exact” figures. For example, the narrative in which Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi is presented as a “good” hetman who distributes the spoils of war taken from the opponent - that is, let me repeat, the inalienable collective property of the whole army, which should be amassed and fairly shared: “He chose for himself from among one and a half thousand Tatars that had been taken alive the best 500 men and eleven princes and other of their leaders, and the rest of the Tatar prisoners he gave to his Host.”⁷⁸

And here are two parallel episodes of the leader's gestures of “gratitude” to his army: the hero of the first is Khmel'nyts'kyi, and of the second, Mazepa. Allow me to note in passing that the parallelization of these two figures in this context is clearly significant, inasmuch as it identifies “good” hetmans. Thus Velychko in­cludes Mazepa, who was already anathemized at the time of the writing of this chronicle, in this group. After the first victorious engagement with the Crown units, Khmel'nyts'kyi sends the Zaporozhian Sich: “A reciprocal gift: for one ban­ner [korohva], four good banners; for one horse-tail standard, two horse-tail stan­dards; for one mace, two precious [vyshmeniti] maces; for one kettledrum, three large kettledrums; for three cannon, six top-quality cannon; for the army's good work, a thousand ‘beaten' thalers [bytyi taler] for the Host, and 300 thalers for the holy Church and its servants.”⁷⁹ Ivan Mazepa does the same, sending the Sich after his election: “A gift for all Sich kurins of 100 gold coins each, a pitcher of al­cohol and 10 barrels of various kinds of meal for each kurin [...] He also gave each otaman personally crimson cloth, and to the Kish otaman he gave two and three times as much in woolen cloth and various fabrics, and also his starshyna.”⁸⁰

A clear illustration of Cossack axiology in Samiilo Velychko's text is the de­scription of the “beautiful” troops after “successful” battles at Zhovti Vody and at Korsun in the spring of 1648:

Khmel'nyts'kyi's whole host, Cossack and Tatar, was able to afford horses, armor for horses [rondy], harness and armor, quivers, swords, and other weapons, money [denhy] also and simple and rich cloth [...] so that when after the two above-mentioned battles that host mounted their horses and started out on campaign with Khmel'nyts'kyi, when [you] saw what they looked like from the side or from above, you could say that these were fields seeded with Dutch or Italian poppies and in bloom.⁸¹

There is no doubt that we should view Hryhorii Hrabianka's famous elogium for Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi in the context of military expectations that the hetman's authority was that of the “supreme leader.” It is worth quoting in its entirety:

A man worthy of the name hetman: boldly he was ready to take on any mis­fortunes, even more diligent was he amidst these very misfortunes; whereby no toils tired his body, and his good spirit could not be subdued by adver­saries. He endured cold and heat equally. He ate and drank what nature de­manded and was not overcome by sleep at night or during the day. When he lacked time due to affairs and military matters, he rested only a little, and then not on expensive beds, but on such beddings as a military man ought. Even amid the military din, he slept calmly, in no way concerned. His dress did not stand out at all against the others, only the gear and his horses were somewhat better. He was often seen covered with a military cloak, as he rested among the guards. He went first into battle and was the last to leave it.⁸²

As has already been noted by researchers, Hrabianka's elogium is an almost literal translation of the description of Hannibal in Titus Livy's History (Ab urbe condita, 21.4) - with only the passages of praise used, because the praise is followed by a list of the leader's vices (cruelty, perfidy, blasphemy, etc.), which, according to Livy, were equal to his virtues, and so this section was omitted.⁸³ The intro­duction by the Cossack historian into his work of this passage from Livy, whose work gives more than ample scope for modeling the image of an ideal ruler, politi­cian, and patriot, is not, in my opinion, accidental. Of all possible models, Hra- bianka, a typical product of the Cossack class, with ties from a young age to the Zaporozhian Host, was most drawn to the “leadership” version - the ideal of the chief, the best member of the military collective, who is raised above the “people” only by the weight of his obligations.

In summing up, we can say that the similarity between the two models of “democracy” - gentry and Cossack - is as superficial as the similarities between the Russian and Ukrainian versions of respect for the God-given authority of the anointed ruler described above. In both cases, the two sides use the same rhetorical cliches, but when the contexts are compared more carefully, it becomes obvious that different meanings are hidden behind the customary vocabulary. In light of this duality, the Cossackpolitia emerges as filled with unsolvable contradictions. This is because in it “just” authority means, above all, the collective will of the Host, where God's laws are inextricably interwoven with the archaic laws of Cos­sack brotherhood, although this authority is described with ready-made formulas that were developed by very different social practices and social orders. Conse­quently, each of the two models - Russian or Commonwealth - appears as a two­faced Janus: on the obverse, reverence for the sacrum of the anointed tsar; on the reverse, its virtual rejection; on the obverse, slogans of Commonwealth democ­racy; on the reverse, the military democracy of a closed military collective; on the obverse, invocations to “beloved motherland our Ukraine” as a territorial entity; on the reverse, the Zaporozhian Host, taken out of the spatial-territorial frame­work. In conclusion it remains to add that each of these “faces of Janus” had, mu­tatis mutandis, its continuation (or second birth?) in the nation-building that was of such concern in the Romantic age.

Translated from the Ukrainian by Marta Skorupsky

NOTES

Originally published as: Natalia M. Iakovenko, “‘Hospodari vitchyzny': uiavlennia kozats'koi ta tserkovnoi elity Het'manshchyny pro pryrodu, reprezentatsiiu i obov'iazky vlady (druha polovyna XVII - pochatok XVIII st.),” in Mazepa e il suo tempo: storia, società /Mazepa and his Time. History, Culture, Society, ed. Giovanna Siedina (Alessandria: dell'Orso, 2004), 7-37. Copyright 2004 by Edizioni dell'Orso. Reprinted with permission. Natalia M. Iakovenko, “‘Hospodari vitchyzny': uiavlennia kozats'koi ta tserkovnoi elity Het'manshchyny pro pryrodu, reprezentatsiiu i obov'iazky vlady (druha polovyna XVII - pochatok XVIII st.),” in Natalia M. Iakovenko, Dzerkala Identychnosti. Doslidzhenniia z istorii uiavlenta idei v Ukra'ini XVI - pochatku XVIIIstolittia (Kyiv: laurus, 2012), 397-426. Copyright 2012 by Laurus and Natalia Iakovenko. Reprinted with permission.

1 The works of Teofan Prokopovych, which laid the theoretical foundation of Russian absolutism, include, primarily: Slovopokhval’noe v den' rozhdestva blagorodneishago gosudaria tsarevicha i velikogo kniazia Petra Petrovicha [A Word of Praise on the Birthday of the Most Noble Sovereign Tsarevich and Great Prince Petr Petrovich] (delivered in 1715, published in 1717); Slovo o vlasti i chesti tsarskoi, iako ot samogo Boga v mire uchinena est [A Word on Royal Power and Honor, Which Derives in the World from God Himself] (delivered and published in 1718); Slovo v densviatogo blagovernogo kniazia Aleksandra Nevskogo [A Word on the Day of the Holy Blessed Prince Alexander Nevskii] (delivered in 1718, published in 1720); the treatise Pravda voli monarshei [The Right of the Monarch's Will] (published in 1722); Slovo na pokhvalu blazhen- nyia i vechnodostoinyia pamiati Petra Velikogo [A Word of Praise on the Blessed and Eternally Memorable Peter the Great] (delivered and printed in 1725). For a republication of the sermons, see Feofan Prokopovich, Sochineniia, ed. I. P. Eremin (Moscow-Leningrad, 1961).

2 Serhii Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford, 2001), 153-65.

3 For this system of views in greater detail, see: Natalia Iakovenko, Paralel 'nyi svit. Doslidzhennia z istortì uiavlen' ta idei v Ukra'iniXVI-XVIIst. (Kyiv, 2002), 174-88, 231-57, 278-87.

4 The passage from Petro Mohyla's introduction is quoted from Khvedir Titov, Materiialy dlia istorii knyzhnoi spravy na Vkraini v XVI-XVIII vv. Vsezbirka peredmov do ukrains kykh starodrukiv (Kyiv, 1924), 323. For more about the context and forms of political discourse in the Orthodox Church in the i62os-i64os, see: I. Sevcenko, “The Many Worlds of Peter Mohyla,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 8, nos 1-2 (June 1984): 9-44; Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine, 162-9, 237-46; Iakovenko, Paralel 'nyi svit, 311-24.

5 For greater detail, see: Urszula Augustyniak, Wazowie i “krolowie rodacy.” Studium wladzy krolewskiej w Rzeczypospolitej XVII wieku (Warsaw, 1999), 45-66; E. Opalinski, Kultura polityczna szlachty polskiej w latach 1597-1652 (Warsaw, 1995).

6 “Przodkowie nasi Sarmatae Rossi do W. M., ad Sarmatas Polonos, libere accesserunt (...) non ad religionem, sed cum religione, nie do tutulow i hon- orow, ale z tytulami i honorami accessimus do tej spolnej Ojczyzny naszej.” Quoted from the publication of the speech in the addendum to the article: Frank E. Sysyn, “Regionalism and Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ukraine: The Nobility's Grievances at the Diet of 1641,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 6, no. 2 (1982): 186, 189. For a discussion of the regional consciousness of the Ruthenian nation against the backdrop of a “contract,” see ibid., 171-85. On the consolidation of the idea of a “Ruthenian gentry” as the third equal partner in the Commonwealth of Two Nations, see also Iakovenko, Paralel'nyi svit, 256-7, 294-5.

7 On the modification of the concept of the “national” in the new political and social circumstances of this period, see: Frank E. Sysyn, “Concepts of Nation­hood in Ukrainian History Writing, 1620-1690,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 10, nos 3-4 (1986): 393-423.

8 This attempt is discussed in Natalia Iakovenko, “Kyiv pid shatrom Sventol'dy- chiv: mohylians'kyi panehiryk 1646 r. ‘Tentoria venienti',” in idem, Dzerkala identychnosti. Doslidzhennia z istorii uiavlen' ta idei v UkrainiXVI-pochatku XVIIIstolittia (Kyiv, 2012).

9 Especially in the chapter “Hetmans and Metropolitans” in Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine, 236-73.

10 On this idea in the views of the eighteenth-century “Little Russian patriots” in greater detail, see Zenon Kohut, “Shliakhets'ka demokratiia v chasy samod- erzhavstva: politychni pohliady Hryhoriia Poletyky,” in idem, Korinnia identychnosti. Studii z rann ’omodernoi istorii Ukrainy (Kyiv, 2004), 102-16. Original English version: Zenon E. Kohut, “A Gentry Democracy within

an Autocracy: The Politics of Hryhorii Poletyka (1723/25-84),” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 3-4 (1979-80): 507-19.

11 From the work “Grikhy rozmaitii, vokrattsi napisannye.” Quoted from loanykii Galiatovs'kyi, Kliuch rozuminnia, ed. Inna Chepiha (Kyiv, 1985), 380-1.

12 Quoted from V.I. Krekoten', Opovidannia Antoniia Radyvylovs ’koho. Z istorii ukrains ’koi novelistyky XVII st. (Kyiv, 1983), 381.

13 Lazar Baranovych, Truby sloves propovidnykh (Kyiv, 1674). Quoted from: Ukrains'kapoeziia. Seredyna XVIIst., comp. V.I. Krekoten and M.M. Sulyma (Kyiv, 1992), 220.

14 Lazar Baranovych, “Plach o prestavlenii velikogo gosudaria Alekseia Mikhailovicha” (1676), in ibid, 227.

15 HryhorijHrabjanka’s “The Great War of BohdanXmel'nyc’kyj,” Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature. Texts, vol. 9, with an introduction by Yuri Lutsenko (Cambridge, ma, 1990), 338.

16 For the procedural order of the coronation of Polish kings, see Stanislaw Kutrzeba, ed. “Ordo coronandi Regis Poloniae,” in Archiwum Komisji Histo- rycznej Akademii Umiejctnosci, vol. 11 (Cracow, 1909), 133-216. See Boris A. Uspenskii, “Liturgicheskii status tsaria v Russkoi Tserkvi: priobshchenie Sv. Tainam (Istoriko-liturgicheskii etiud),” in Kamen’Kraezhg"l’n": Rhetoric of the Medieval Slavic World. Essays Presented to Edward L. Keenan on His Sixtieth Birthday by His Colleagues and Students, ed. N. Shields Kollman,

D. Ostrowski, A. Pliguzov, and D. Rowland. Harvard Ukrainian Studies 19 (Cambridge, ma, 1995), 686-731.

17 Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine, 220-7.

18 Ibid., 227-35.

19 For an analysis of such examples, see ibid., 225-7.

20 Jakuba Michalowskiego, wojskiego lubelskiego, a pozniej kasztelana bieckiego, Ksiega pamiptnicza, ed. Antoni Z. Helcel (Cracow, 1864), 377. For a commen­tary on this and other instances of a play on Khmel'nyts'kyi’s name Bohdan as “God-given” [Boha danyi], see Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine, 221-2. English translation of the quotation: ibid., 221.

21 Ukralns'kapoeziia. Seredyna XVIIst., 101-2. For commentary on these poems, also see Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine, 222-4.

22 Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine, 224.

23 Samoilo Velichko, Letopis' sobytii v Iugo-Zapadnoi Rossii vXVII veke, vol. 1 (Kyiv, 1848), 310; ibid., 2: 296.

24 Akty, otnosiashchiesia k istorii Iuzhnoi i Zapadnoi Rossii, sobrannye v izdannye Arkheograficheskoi komissiei (hereinafter - Akty luZR), vol. 7 (1657-63; 1668-9) (St Petersburg, 1872), 97.

25 See an undated letter from Lazar Baranovych to Ivan Samoilovych and Vely- chkovs'kyi's panegyric in Ivan Velychkovs'kyi, Tvory, ed. V.P. Kolosova and V.I. Krekoten' (Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 1972), 55, 158.

26 Feofan Prokopovich, Sochineniia, ed. I.P. Eremin (Moscow-Leningrad, 1961), 152; Velychkovs'kyi, Tvory, 169. For Ornovs'kyi, see Muza Roxolanska o Tryum- falney slawiey Fortunie, z Herbownych Znakow [...] P Iana Mazepy Hetmana, Woysk Ich Carskiego Przeswietnego Maiestatv, Zaporoskich (Chernihiv, 1688); quoted in Roksolanski Parnas: polskojpzyczna poezja ukrainska od konca XVI do poczqtku XVIII wieku, Cz. 2: Antologia, edited by Rostyslaw Radyszewskyi (Cracow, 1998), 380.

27 Galiatovs'kyi, Kliuch rozuminnia, 348.

28 Iakym Zapasko and Iaroslav Isaievych, Pam ’iatky knyzhkovoho mystetstva: kataloh starodrukiv, vydanykh na Ukrami, vol. i (1574-1700) (Lviv, 1981), nos. 133, 140, 168, 188. For a detailed analysis of the exhortations of Deacon Agape­tus with an overview of literature concerning the Latin-language and Slavic translations, see Ihor Sevcenko, “Ljubomudrejsij Kyr'' Agapit Diakon: On a Kiev Edition of a Byzantine Mirror of Princes” in idem, Byzantium and the Slavs in Letters and Culture (Cambridge, ma, 1991), 497-526. This includes a facsimile of the Kyivan literary monument: 527-57.

In the collection of instructive texts entitled Likarstvo na ospalyi umysl cholovichyi under the title “Testament... Vasylia tsesara kgretskogo... do syna svoego, iuzh koronovanogo, L'va Filozofa” (for a description of this publication, see Zapasko and Isaievych, Pam ’iatky knyzhkovoho mystetstva, no. 70). For other Ukrainian translations of the “Testament,” see Vladimir N. Peretts, “‘Testament tsaria Vasiliia' v ukrainskikh perevodakh,” Sbornik otde- leniia russkogo iazyka i slovestnosti Akademii nauk 101, no. 2 (1926): 50-72 (contains a copy of the first chapter of the “Testament” from the Ostroh edi­tion, 50-4). Lev N. Pushkarev, Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia mysl Rossii. Vtoraiapolovina XVIIveka (Moscow, 1982), 172. The author mentions the Kyivan Cave Monastery Press publications of the “Testament” of 1636 and 1648 (p. 171), but this is a misunderstanding, because the Kyivan Cave Monastery Press did not publish these books at that time.

This copy is contained in the Department of Manuscripts of the V.I. Vernad- s'kyi National Library of Ukraine, under the identification code Kyr. 795. G. Brogi Bercoff, “The Letopisec of Dimitrij Tuptalo, the Metropolitan of Rostov, in the Context of Western European Culture,” Ricerche slavistiche 39-40, no. 1 (1992-93): 298, 325.

Ukra'ins'kapoeziia. Seredyna XVIIst., 225. Ibid., 224-8.

Feodosii Sofonovych, Khronika z litopystsiv starodavnikh, ed. Iurii Mytsyk and Volodymyr Kravchenko (Kyiv, 1992), 228, 230-1, 236.

These nuances are analyzed in Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine, 306-18.

Ibid., 319-29.

Litopys Samovydtsia, ed. Iaroslav Dzyra (Kyiv, 1971), 67. Velichko, Letopis' sobytii v Iugo-Zapadnoi Rossii, 1:541. For more on the idea of a contract as a political concept of the Hetmanate, see Zenon E. Kohut, Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy: Imperial Absorption of the Hetmanate, ry6os-i8ios (Cambridge, ma: 1988), 59-64. Quoted from the republished letter in the addenda to Orest Subtelny, The Mazepists. Ukrainian Separatism in the Early Eighteenth Century (New York, 1981), 201-2.

Velichko, Letopis sobytii v lugo-Zapadnoi Rossii, 1: 120.

Ibid., 172.

Compare, inter alia, the thorough analysis in Pavel V. Lukin, Narodonye predstavleniia o gosudarstvennoi vlasti v Rossii XVII veka (Moscow, 2000). Echo glosu wolajqcego napuszcze (Kyiv, 1689). Quoted from G. Brogi Berkoff, “Z zagadnien roznic kulturowych na ziemiach wschodnioslowianskich na przykladzie trojjczycznych dziel Stefana Jaworskiego,” in Barok w Polsce i w Europie Srodkowo-Wschodniej. Drogiprzemian i osnowy kultur, ed. Janusz Pelc, Krzysztof Mrowcewicz, Marek Prejs (Warsaw, 2000), 72.

Pawel Baranecki, “Trybut jasnie wielmoznemu Jmci Panu lanowi Samojlow- iczowi (Kyiv, 1687;,” in Roksolanski Parnas, 2:321

Jan Ornowski, “Muza roksolanska o tryjumfalnej slawie i fortunie z her- bowych znakow jasnie wielmoznego Jmci Pana P. Jana Mazepy... (Cherni­hiv, 1688),” in Roksolanski Parnas, 2:380.

For a survey of political texts, see Augustyniak, Wazowie i “krolowie rodacy,” 53-5.

Velichko, Letopis' sobytii v lugo-Zapadnoi Rossii, 2: 225, 296, 469, and others; HryhorijHrabjanka’s “The Great War of BohdanXmel'nyc'ky,” 318 passim; quoted from Viktor Horobets', Elita kozats’kol Ukralny vposhukakhpolitych- nol lehitymatsil: stosunky z Moskvoiu ta Varshavoiu (Kyiv, 2001), 356.

Quoted from Subtelny, The Mazepists, 190-1.

Velychkovs'kyi, Tvory, 55.

Pawel Baraniecki, “Trybut jasnie wielmoznemu jmci Panu Janowi Samojlow- iczowi,” in Roksolanski Parnas, 2:323.

Anonymous poem on the occasion of the stripping of Samoilovych of the hetmancy in 1687, cited in Velichko, Letopis'sobytii vlugo-Zapadnoi Rossii, 3: 16-17.

Litopys Samovydtsia, 144-5.

Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s Rossiei. Dokumenty i materialy, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1954), 187. In Stepan Velychenko's opinion, what is described here can be identified with the consecration of the hetman, but Serhii Plokhy, disagreeing with Velychenko, is more careful in judging Sukhanov's testimony; he believes that if there was a consecration, it would have taken place earlier (Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine, 232).

Velichko, Letopis' sobytii v Iugo-Zapadnoi Rossii, 1:51.

Opalinski, Kultura polityczna szlachty polskiej w latach 1587-1652, 93-5. Ibid., 30-1, 60, and others; Velichko, Letopis' sobytii v lugo-Zapadnoi Rossii, 1:310.

This chronicle from the end of the 1670s, most likely authored by Vasyl' and Ivan Dvorets'kyi, has been published by lurii Mytsyk, see idem., “Letopisets Dvoretskikh - pamiatnik ukrainskogo letopisaniia XVII v., in Letopisi i khroniki. Sbornik statei, ed. V.I. Buganov (Moscow, 1984), 219-34.

See P.M. Sas, Politychna kul'tura ukrains’koho suspil'stva (kinets’XVI-persha polovyna XVII st.) (Kyiv, 1998), 109-11; V. Shcherbak, Ukrains ’ke kozatstvo: formuvannia social ’noho stanu. Druha polovyna XV- seredyna XVII st. (Kyiv, 2000), 57-60; Istoriia ukrains’koho kozatstva. Narysy u dvokh tomakh, ed.

V.A. Smolii (Kyiv, 2006), 1:161-63; M. Hrushevs'kyi, “Baida-Vyshnevets'kyi v poezii i istorii,” in Zapysky Ukrains ’koho Naukovoho tovarystva v Kyievi, bk. 3 (1909): 139.

See this episode in the published fragments of Lassota's diary: Erikh Liasota iz Stebleva, “Shchodennyk,” Zhovten 10 (1984): 104.

Litopys Samovydtsia, 91.

Augustyniak, Wazowie i “krolowie rodacy,” 70-1. Velichko, Letopis' sobytii v Iugo-Zapadnoi Rossii, 1:32-5.

Ibid., 471.

For a comparison of the testimonies see Valerii A. Smolii and Valerii S. Stepankov, Bohdan Khmel 'nyts 'kyi. Sotsial ’no-politychnyi portret (Kyiv, 1993), 80-1.

Litopys Samovydtsia, 49-50.

HryhorijHrabjanka’s “The Great War of BohdanXmel'nyc’kyi,” 320. Velichko, Letopis' sobytii v Iugo-Zapadnoi Rossii, 1:32-3 (Khmel'nyts'kyi's letter); ibid., 1:61 (Barabash death).

Litopys Samovydtsia, 105.

HryhorijHrabjanka’s “The Great War of BohdanXmel'nyc'kyi,” 397. Velichko, Letopis' sobytii v Iugo-Zapadnoi Rossii, 2:163-4.

From a letter from Wojciech Miaskowski dated 4 August 1648: Karol Sza- jnocha, Dwa lata dzejow naszych, 1646, 1648. Opowiadanie i zrodla, vol. 2 (Warsaw, 1900), no. 35.

In a letter from the king's secretary Wojciech Bieczynski sent from the camp ouside Sokal dated 8 June 1651 in Ojczyste spominki w pismach do dziejow dawnej Polski, ed. Ambrozy Grabowski, vol. 2 (Cracow, 1845): 72.

Jan Wladyslaw Poczobut Odlanicki, Pamiptnik, 1640-1684, ed. Andrzej Rachuba (Warsaw, 1987), 176.

Velichko, Letopis' sobytii v Iugo-Zapadnoi Rossii, 2:391.

Compare the use of this topos in political practices: Horobets', Elita kozats ’koi Ukrainy, 353 passim.

On the topos of military “success” (fortuna belli) as a material measure of a successful war in greater detail, see Iakovenko, Paralel'nyi svit, 192-208.

78 Velichko, Letopis' sobytii v lugo-Zapadnoi Rossii, 1:166.

79 Ibid., 74.

80 Ibid., 3:59.

81 Ibid., 1:72.

82 Quoted from: Frank E. Sysyn, “‘A Man Worthy of the Name Hetman': The Fashioning of Khmel'nyts'kyi as a Hero in the Hrabianka Chronicle,” in Amelia M. Glaser, ed., Stories of Khmel’nyts’kyi: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Palo Alto, 2015), 45; Hryhorij Hrab- janka’s “The Great War of Bohdan Xmel’nyc’kyi,” 375.

83 Marko Antonovych, “Kharakterystyka B. Khmel'nyts'koho u Hrabianky i Liviia,” Ukralns’kyi istoryk, 32 (1995), 165-6; Frank E. Sysyn, “Recovering the Ancient and Recent Past: The Shaping of Memory and Identity in Early Modern Ukraine,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 1 (2001): 82-4.