In Search of an Orthodox Monarch

As Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s rule took hold, the new and still inchoate Cos­sack polity became ever more deeply involved in the European system of international relations. That system, characterized by religious divisions and traditional alliances based on religious affinity, largely determined the course of the Thirty Years’ War, and was one of the results of the con- fessionalization of European politics.

In the early stages of the revolt, the Cossacks attempted to keep as many options open as possible with respect to the religious affiliations of their potential partners and allies. The first important step in their search for new alliances was the establishment of a pact with the Crimea, which made possible the impressive Cossack victories in the first months of the uprising and was an important element of Khmelnytsky’s military strat­egy in the years that followed.^[591] In political and religious terms, this al­liance was more than controversial. The pact with the Tatars aroused dissatisfaction and elicited numerous complaints from the Ukrainian population about the behavior of the Tatars, who would often take cap­tives in the Ukrainian lands, at times even with the permission of the Cos­sack hetman. Accusations of having betrayed Christianity and making common cause with its Muslim foes were heaped upon Khmelnytsky by Roman Catholic Poles and Orthodox Muscovites alike, but had limited influence on the making of Cossack policy.

Proceeding on the basis of strategic considerations, Khmelnytsky maintained his alliance with the Crimean Khanate as long as he possibly could, for a period of almost six years. For the sake of the alliance, Khmel­nytsky declined proposals from the Venetian Senate to undertake a joint campaign against the Ottomans in 1650; in 1651, he went so far as to ac­cept formal vassalage to the sultan. That step was made all the easier by Ottoman religious policy, which tolerated the Orthodoxy and Protest­antism of the empire’s East European subjects, counterposing those reli­gious traditions to the Catholicism of its principal European rivals, the Habsburgs. Only when the Ottomans showed themselves unprepared to provide effective assistance to Cossack Ukraine in its debilitating struggle with the Commonwealth did the Hetmanate cease to proceed down the path already trodden by other Ottoman vassals in Southern and Eastern Europe, most notably Orthodox Moldavia and Wallachia.^[592]

As for relations with Protestant lands, Khmelnytsky, for his part, showed considerable initiative in his dealings with Transylvania, an Ot­toman dependency, and later with Sweden. Nor did he neglect relations with Janusz Radziwill, the Lithuanian field hetman and protector of the Lithuanian Protestants, who was married to the daughter of the Ortho­dox hospodar of Moldavia, Vasile Lupu. For Khmelnytsky and the Het- manate, the Orthodox connection was the most natural one, given contemporary practice in international relations. From the first year of the uprising, Khmelnytsky paid special attention to Orthodox Moldavia, thinking at first to take the Moldavian throne for himself, and subse­quently forcing Lupu to give his daughter Rosanda in marriage to his son Tymish. The marriage allied Khmelnytsky not only with the hospodar’s Orthodox family but also with the Protestant branch of the Radziwills.^[593]

Yet the major potential ally of the Cossack polity in the Orthodox world was not little Moldavia, squeezed between the Ottomans and the Com­monwealth, but mighty and traditionally anti-Polish Muscovy.

In the 1590s the Cossacks considered and accepted ‘contracts’ for campaigns against the Turks and the Crimean Tatars from other rulers as well, including Emperor Rudolf II and Pope Clement VIII. Later they be­came actively involved in the Thirty Years’ War on the side of the Catholic rulers.^[595] Even though the Muscovite tsar was only one of the European monarchs prepared to pay for the Zaporozhians⁵ military services, con­tacts with Moscow turned out to have the most lasting significance for the Cossacks’ international relations, and payments to the Cossacks from the tsar’s treasury continued into the early seventeenth century. Moreover, the proximity of the Muscovite tsardom’s extensive territories and the readiness of the tsars themselves to populate them with emigrants from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth made Muscovy a particularly at­tractive ally for the Ukrainian Cossacks in their uprisings.

Kryshtof Kosynsky, the first leader of Cossack rebels against the Commonwealth, planned to go over to Muscovite territory with his Cossacks. Participants in the Nalyvaiko rebellion also attempted to cross the border into Muscovy. Each successive crisis in Cossack relations with the Commonwealth inspired Cossack plans to migrate or even go over ‘with their towns’ to the Tsardom of Muscovy.

It is nevertheless important to note that Cossack attempts to enter the tsar’s service and their resettlement on Muscovite territory in the wake of failed uprisings were not guided by a consistent strategy, but were rather determined by the needs of the moment. When Cossack interests re­quired their participation in the Commonwealth’s wars against Muscovy, they showed the same alacrity as they had in seeking to enter ‘the tsar’s service’. Cossack involvement in the Time of Troubles, Sahaidachny’s campaign against Muscovy in 1618, and the participation of Cossack forces in the Smolensk War (1632-4) are all evidence of the opportunism of Cossack policy with regard to Muscovy. For a long time, that policy was bereft of any ideological underpinnings, including religious ones.

124-31. On Cossack participation in the Thirty Years’ War, see Baran and Gajecky, The Cossacks in the Thirty Years War.

⁷ See Floria, ‘Drevnerusskie traditsii’, pp. 185, 207-16, 219-21. On resettlement to Mus­covite territory during the revolt of 1637-8, see Hrushevs’kyi, Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy, vol.

Patriarch Theophanes of Jerusalem, being sensitive to the idea of con­fessional unity, forbade the Cossacks to make war on Muscovy, while blessing their campaign against the Ottomans. In his Verses on the Sorrow­ful Obsequy for the Worthy Knight Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, Kasiian Sakovych made some effort to reduce the significance of the Muscovite episode in the activity of his Orthodox hero. Yet in their relations with Moscow, the Cossacks clearly lacked a broader confessional awareness that might have served to unite not only the Orthodox of the Common­wealth but those of Muscovy and the eastern Ottoman possessions as well. Consciousness of Orthodox solidarity began to grow only in the 1620s in connection with the activity of Cossackdom’s new ally, the Ortho­dox hierarchy consecrated by Theophanes. The hierarchs did not regard Muscovy merely as a neighboring country that was subject to pe­riodic attack by their new defenders, the Zaporozhian Cossacks. In their eyes it was, rather, a great Orthodox state whose support they earnestly sought in the confrontation with their enemies in the Commonwealth. But its significance did not end there. For the hierarchs, unity with Moscow was not only a matter of political orientation, but also a basis for the creation of a new national and religious identity that would later come to be disseminated as Little Russianism.^[597]

The Intellectual Origins of Little Russia

The struggle for the establishment and implementation of the Union of Brest became the stimulus that awakened hitherto inert Ruthenian society from its intellectual slumber, forcing it into an engagement with literature and learning that led to a reassessment of its identity.

During the preparations for the church union and especially in the course of the sobors of Brest, the Orthodox of the Commonwealth were already seeking to develop their ties with the Eastern patriarchs as much as possible and making active use of their support in the struggle with their Uniate opponents.^[598] In the 1620s, the new Orthodox patriarch, Iov Boretsky, constantly stressed that the restored hierarchy had been conse­crated by the patriarch of Jerusalem. Although the dependence of the metropolitanate on Constantinople was never called into question by the Orthodox, the old tradition of treating the tie between Rus' and the Orthodox East as one involving all the Orthodox patriarchs allowed Boretsky to refer to his ‘metropolitan throne of Kyiv and Jerusalem' (prestola mitropolii kievskoia Irusalimskoe).^[599] As discussed earlier, the con­secration of the new hierarchy by the patriarch of Jerusalem and Boret­sky's attitude to that event established the basis for a conception of Kyiv as a second Jerusalem and, of paramount importance in this respect, spun a thread of association between the isolated Kyivan hierarchy and the Eastern Orthodox world.

The other avenue that offered the Orthodox a way out of the isolation forced on them by the Commonwealth authorities was Moscow. The Tsardom of Muscovy was far from terra incognita for the Ruthenian Orthodox. On the eve of the Union of Brest, Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky had sought to make it a factor in the Orthodox-Catholic dialogue, proposing that Ipatii Potii go to Moscow for consultations about the Union.^[600] The Muscovite practice of distributing tsarist alms to the Orthodox churches was well known in the Ruthenian lands of the Com­monwealth, and the Ruthenian Orthodox were among those who frequently benefited from the tsar's financial support. In June 1592, the Lviv Brotherhood, along with Bishop Balaban, Metropolitan Rohoza, and Metropolitan Dionysios of Tuirnovo requested ‘alms’ from the tsar to rebuild the Church of the Dormition, which had been destroyed by fire.^[601] In 1593, seven Orthodox churches in Kamianets received donations from the tsar.^[602] At the time, requesting and receiving alms from Moscow was, of course, a purely religious matter that cast no doubt on the loyalty of the Orthodox to the Commonwealth. That situation changed drastically and developed clear political overtones after the conclusion of the Union of Brest in 1596.

As early as the following year, 1597, an Orthodox in Vilnius was taken to court on the basis of a mere allegation that he had requested alms from the tsar in Moscow for the construction of a brotherhood church and had sought to obtain an altar cloth (antimension) from there for the new church. The brethren refuted the charges against them, but the very fact that the case went to trial signaled an abrupt shift in the official attitude to the practice of soliciting financial aid from Moscow.^[603] If such a request could previously have been made even by Metropolitan Rohoza, who was loyal to the government, after the Union of Brest the mere suspicion of such contacts on the part of the legally outlawed Orthodox Church con­stituted sufficient grounds for court action.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Time of Troubles and the Polish-Lithuanian intervention in Muscovite affairs made the ques­tion of relations between the Orthodox of the Commonwealth and Mus­covy even more acute. In 1606, when a new delegation from the Lviv Brotherhood set off yet again to seek alms in Moscow, King Zygmunt III ordered his own envoys, who were on their way to Muscovy, to arrest the brethren and return them to the Commonwealth.^[604] An appeal from bishops Balaban and Kopystensky concerning the False Dmitrii’s ties with the Jesuits and plans for the propagation of Catholicism in Muscovy was circulated in Moscow about the same time, leading a number of Com­monwealth officials to accuse the Orthodox clergymen of treason against the state.^[605] The appearance of Meletii Smotrytsky’s Threnos in 1610 was also condemned at the royal court as the publication of a ‘slander’ poten­tially abetting Muscovy in its struggle with the Commonwealth.^[606]

Thus the Polish-Lithuanian intervention in Muscovy served to politi­cize Ruthenian Orthodox relations with Moscow even more, rendering them difficult for the future. The Muscovite state, for its part, having sur­vived internal turmoil and foreign intervention, emerged from the experi­ence greatly weakened and plunged into the depths of isolationism, which was not conducive to maintaining the interest of Ruthenian society. The authorities’ assault on the Vilnius Brotherhood and the deaths of the lead­ers of Orthodox Rus’, Prince Ostrozky (1608) and bishops Balaban (1607) and Kopystensky (1610), contributed to the further deterioration of con­tacts between Ruthenian Orthodoxy and Moscow. The situation began to change only with the consecration of the new hierarchy by Patriarch Theo­phanes. His sojourn in Ukraine following the consecration of Filaret (Romanov) as patriarch of Moscow and his efforts to prevent the Cossacks from fighting against their co-religionists in Muscovy could not help but contribute to focusing the new hierarchy’s attention on Moscow. That ef­fect was heightened by the Commonwealth authorities, who made the Orthodox hierarchs feel that they were cornered, with no avenue of escape. Now that the bishops were operating outside the law, relations with Moscow were no longer so menacing to them as they were to hierarchs loyal to the government and recognized by it. Thus, in psycho­logical terms, the way to Moscow was now open from the Kyivan side.

The first to appeal to Moscow for help was Bishop Isaia Kopynsky. Al­though he had been appointed to the eparchy of Peremyshl at his conse­cration, he had not the slightest prospect of assuming office while the royal prohibition remained in effect. The Mhar Monastery in the Lubny area became his temporary residence; from there in December 1622 he dispatched two monks to Putyvl to ask permission for himself and all the monks of the monastery to emigrate to Muscovy. In August 1624, Met­ropolitan Boretsky himself sent an embassy to Moscow. Unlike Kopyn- sky, he was not concerned with a small group of monks, but investigated the prospects of resettling the entire Orthodox clergy of the Dnipro region, as well as the Zaporozhians, in the event that Polish forces routed the Cossacks. As Bishop Isaakii Boryskovych of Lutsk, the metropolitan’s envoy, testified in Moscow, ‘they feared that the Poles would soon attack them and they would have nowhere to turn but to the Sovereign’s mercy. Then they would all—the metropolitan, the bishops, and the Zapo- rozhian Host—seek the Sovereign’s mercy, they would travel in the name of the tsar...’.^[607] An important aspect of Boryskovych’s mission was that he represented not only the interests of the metropolitan but also those of the Cossack officers, for he transmitted an appeal from the new Orthodox hierarchy to the tsar to forgive the Zaporozhians their campaign of 1618 against Moscow.^[608] The close association between the new Orthodox hierarchy and the Cossacks was also noted in Boretsky’s letter to the tsar: the Kyivan metropolitan pointed out that the hierarchy had found refuge from its enemies ‘under the wing of the Christ-loving Host of Cherkasian warriors’.^[609]

Iov Boretsky continued to maintain fairly regular contact with Moscow until his death in 1631. His successor on the metropolitan throne, the above-mentioned Isaia Kopynsky, also favored the Muscovite orienta- tion.^[610] In 1625, one of the hierarchs closest to the Cossacks, Iosyf Kurt- sevych, emigrated ‘in the name of the tsar’, actually doing what Kopynsky had only contemplated. Initially he was well received in Moscow and even appointed archbishop of Suzdal. Kurtsevych’s defection became the most significant episode in the movement of Orthodox clergy to Muscovy that began in the 1620s and continued with varying intensity for the next twenty-five years.^[611] Petro Mohyla’s accession to the Kyivan metropoli­tanate effectively froze relations between the Kyivan Orthodox clergy and the Muscovite state. Those relations became somewhat more intense only in the 1640s, owing to Mohyla’s ambitious program of rebuilding Kyiv’s churches and the Muscovite tsar’s unwavering readiness to pro­vide financial support for Orthodox shrines. In 1640, Mohyla sent a spe­cial mission to Moscow to request assistance for the rebuilding of St Sophia’s Cathedral and, as mentioned earlier, funds for the sarco­phagus of St Volodymyr. In addition, Mohyla offered to send teachers from Kyiv to instruct the Muscovite population.^[612] Subsequent embassies that Mohyla dispatched to Moscow in 1644 and 1646 were also con­cerned with the reconstruction of St Sophia’s Cathedral.^[613]

The question of greatest interest to us in this connection is that of in­terpreting the views, ideas, and conceptions that the Ruthenian Ortho­dox elite brought to its relations with Moscow in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. What did Muscovite Rus’ represent to the Ukrainian and Belarusian Orthodox community at the time of the Union of Brest and afterwards? As is well known, in the 1590s Ipatii Potii re­jected Prince Ostrozky’s proposal to go to Moscow to discuss the Union, referring to Muscovite ‘coarseness, stubbornness, and superstitious­ness’.^[614] Moreover, in the eyes of the Ruthenian elite, Muscovy was the country that had lost the Livonian War to the Commonwealth (and thus, to the Ruthenians as well), and later, during the Time of Troubles, had been so helpless that Polish-Lithuanian and Cossack units had reached the capital itself and occupied it. As a cultural community, however, Orthodox Rus’ must have felt sympathy for Muscovy, with which it had religious affinities, and which had resisted Catholic aggression at the beginning of the seventeenth century. From the religious viewpoint, Muscovy was certainly also regarded as the sole independent Orthodox state, to which, despite its weakness, the entire Orthodox world looked for assistance. The Eastern clergymen who passed through Ukraine and Belarus in a constant stream, heading for Muscovy in search of alms from the tsar, were a direct indication to Orthodox Rus’ of the source from which it might seek assistance against the threat that it was facing.^[615]

Some observations on the ways in which the Orthodox Ruthenians viewed their Muscovite neighbors can be made on the basis of their use of the terms ‘Great’ and ‘Little’ Rus’. The first known use of these terms in early modern Ukraine seems to occur in a letter of 1592 from the Lviv brethren to the tsar, in which Metropolitan Dionysios of Tfirnovo is titled ‘exarch of Little and Great Rus’’.^[616] The terms ‘Little’ and ‘Great’ Rus’ were not late sixteenth-century neologisms. Most authorities consider

284 THE COSSACKS AND RELIGION them to be of Greek origin and date their coinage to the early fourteenth century, when the establishment of the Lviv metropolitan see and the partition of the Kyivan metropolitanate made it necessary for Constan­tinople to differentiate between two metropolitanates and two Rus' en­tities, then already divided along political and ecclesiastical lines.

In the 1330s, the term ‘Little Rus” was applied to the whole Principal­ity of Galicia-Volhynia. It was included in the official title of Prince Iurii- Boleslav, thereby migrating from the ecclesiastical sphere to the political one. The extinction of the Galician dynasty, as well as the subsequent loss of Galician independence, prevented the political connotations of the term from becoming firmly established. Meanwhile, the terms ‘Little’ and ‘Great’ Rus’ continued to be used in the ecclesiastical sense until the late fourteenth century in connection with the dispute about the partition of the former Kyivan metropolitanate, but by the early fifteenth century they had virtually fallen out of use. This applied primarily to the term ‘Little Rus’’, while ‘Great Rus’’ (as well as ‘White Rus’’) continued to be employed in parts of Muscovite Rus’ to denote the polity ruled by the tsar.^[617]

The visit of Patriarch Jeremiah of Constantinople to Ukraine, the struggle for the establishment of the Union of Brest, and, later, for the recognition of the new Orthodox hierarchy consecrated by Patriarch Theophanes created the context in which the Ukrainian Orthodox re­vived the use of the terms ‘Little’ and ‘Great’ Rus’. Little Rus’ termin­ology came to Kyiv from Lviv and the western Ukrainian lands (where it was first revived toward the end of the sixteenth century) along with the Orthodox Galicians who formed the nucleus of Kyiv’s learned circle in the early seventeenth century. As contemporary documents show, it was primarily contacts with Moscow that promoted the use of the terms ‘Little’ and ‘Great’ Rus’ in the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands of the Com­monwealth, since ‘Little Rus’’ was one of the alternative self-definitions that denoted Polish-Lithuanian Rus’ in relation to Muscovite Rus’. Be­ginning with Petro Mohyla, Kyivan metropolitans, who were usually titled metropolitans of ‘all Rus’’, began to style themselves metropolitans of ‘Little Rus’ ’ in their letters to Moscow. Mohyla, for example, referred to himself as metropolitan of ‘Kyiv, Galicia and all Little Rus’’ in his missives to the tsar.^[618] Sylvestr Kosov, while eschewing all mention of ‘Little Rus” in his first letters to Moscow, also referred to himself in a letter of July 1649 to Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich as pastor of the ‘divinely protected city of Kyiv, my metropolitan throne and that of all Little Rus’’.^[619] In time, ‘Little Rus” became a constant element of Kosov’s titu- lature in his letters to Moscow.

The terminology of ‘Great’ and ‘Little’ Rus’ was also accepted to some extent by the Muscovite side in its contacts with the Commonwealth. Patriarch Filaret, who generally styled himself patriarch of ‘all Rus’’, em­ployed the title ‘Patriarch of all Great Rus’’ in his letters to Boretsky.^[620] By the early seventeenth century, the Muscovite state had quite a long tradi­tion of using the term ‘Great Rus’’. As for the term ‘Little Rus’’, it was apparently little known and infrequently used until the mid-seventeenth century; at the time, the toponym ‘White Rus’’ (BelaiaRus’) and the eth­nonym ‘White Russians’ (belarustsy), along with ‘Lithuania’ and ‘Lithu­anians’, were used in Moscow with reference to the Ruthenian lands of the Commonwealth.^[621] One of the few known instances of the use of the term ‘Little Rus’’ by Muscovite diplomats dates to 1634. In that year, during negotiations to end the Smolensk War, which was going badly for the Muscovites, the Polish-Lithuanian side attempted to eliminate the reference to ‘all Rus’ ’ from the tsar’s official title, maintaining that its use implied the tsar’s claim to sovereignty over the Ruthenian lands of the Commonwealth. As was to be expected, the Muscovite diplomats re­fused to alter the tsar’s title and noted in this connection: ‘It is unseemly to undertake this: your Little Rus’, which belongs to Poland and Lithua­nia, does not pertain to the title of “all Rus’” belonging to His Tsarist Majesty; there is no reason for you to apply that Rus’ of yours to all Rus’.’^[622] Thus, at least in their official relations with the Polish-Lithu­anian side, Muscovite diplomats declined to consider Little Rus’ a com­ponent of ‘all Rus’’.

Who represented Moscow and ‘Great Rus’’ in the eyes of the Ruthen­ian Orthodox elite? Judging from Ukrainian sources of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, that representative was not the patriarch but the tsar, the sole independent Orthodox ruler. It was to the tsar, not to the patriarch of Moscow, that Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky urged a mission to discuss the Union.^[623] In 1592, four letters were sent by the brotherhood to Moscow requesting alms from the tsar for the recon­struction of the church of the Dormition Brotherhood, which had burned down. The letters were addressed, respectively, to the tsar, the tsarina, Boris Godunov, and the clerk Andrei Shchelkalov; there was no missive to the patriarch. It would appear that the Ruthenians either were not aware of the consecration of the patriarch of Moscow by Patriarch Jere­miah of Constantinople or did not attach much importance to the event. Even the Orthodox author of Warning (presumably Iov Boretsky), who was well informed about developments leading to the Union, defined the goal of Jeremiah’s mission to Moscow in very general terms as the ‘arrangement... of church needs’.³⁶ It is telling that for a long time there was no mention of the patriarch of Moscow in Orthodox-Uniate polemics, which stressed the rights of the pope and the four Eastern pa­triarchs.³⁷ A change in the stereotypical perception of Muscovy by Or­thodox Ruthenians becomes apparent only in the 1620s, when Patriarch Filaret of Moscow, the father of the new tsar of Muscovy, Mikhail Ro­manov, returned from Polish captivity and began to play a leading role at the tsar’s court.³⁸

When the members of the Lviv Brotherhood decided to follow the ex­ample of the Eastern suppliants for alms from the tsar and sent their mis­sion to Moscow in 1592, their letter to the tsar presented a series of arguments that laid the foundation for all future contacts between the Orthodox Ruthenians and Moscow. This letter constitutes the first known instance in which the case for the religious, ethnic, and historical affinity of Rus’ was elaborated at length. Tsar Fedor Ivanovich of Muscovy was represented in the letter not only as the patron of the Orthodox world, but also as the leader of the whole ‘Rus’ race, made up of many tribes’, with which the brethren identified themselves. Allusions to this leading role of the tsar were buttressed by references to his descent from Prince Volodymyr the Great, ‘who enlightened the whole Rus’ race with holy baptism’.³⁹

Zakhariia Kopystensky, responding to Krevza’s book in Palinodia (Palinode), understood Ostrozky to be proposing a mission to the tsar. See Lev Krevza’s ‘A Defense of Church Unity' and ZaxarijaKopystens’kyj’s ‘Palinodia’, pp. 128, 870.

³⁶See ‘Perestoroha’ in Ukra'ins’ka IiteraturaXVIIst., p. 30. The establishment of the Moscow patriarchate was at first highly controversial in Muscovy, with the church hierarchy opposing this initiative on the part of the court. For a discussion of the literature and sources on the es­tablishment of the patriarchate, see Borys A. Gudziak, ‘The Sixteenth-Century Muscovite Church and Patriarch Jeremiah Il’s Journey to Muscovy, 1588-1589: Some Comments con­cerning the Historiography and Sources’, HUS 19 (1995): 200-25.

³⁷ See especially the polemic between Lev Krevza and Zakhariia Kopystensky, Lev Krevza’s ‘A Defense of Church Unity’ and Zaxarija Kopystens’kyj’s ‘Palinodia’.

³⁸Characteristically, in the eyes of Metropolitan Iov Boretsky, even then the patriarch was second in importance to the tsar. See the order of precedence in the salutations to the tsar and the patriarch in Boretsky’s letters (VUR, 1: 46-9).

³⁹ See AZR (1851): vol. 4, no. 34, pp. 47-9.

In the opinion of Boris Floria, the argument for the unity of Rus' set forth in the brotherhood’s letter constituted ‘nothing other than a re­hearsal of the most general notions of the program developed in Great Russia for the reunification of the East Slavic peoples’.^[624] Some of the ideas in the letter did indeed echo allusions by early sixteenth-century Muscovite diplomats to the claims of Ivan III to Kyiv, Smolensk, and ‘the whole land of Rus’’ as the legacy of his ‘forebears’.^[625] One should also not exclude the possibility that the Lviv brethren were influenced by earlier Muscovite chronicles. Familiarity with these sources and with the histor­ical conceptions elaborated in them (most notably the idea of the transfer of the Rus’ capital from Kyiv to Vladimir and thence to Moscow) may have come about either directly or through the intermediacy of Polish chroniclers, who made extensive use of Ruthenian and Muscovite chron­icles.^[626] At the same time, as Edward L. Keenan has shown, there are hardly sufficient grounds to posit the existence of any program of ‘reuni­fication’ in sixteenth-century Muscovy.^[627]

Appealing to the tsar in their letter, the members of the Lviv Brother­hood not only advanced the idea of unity, which apparently lay under a pall of neglect in late sixteenth-century Muscovy,^[628] but also approached it in a manner quite foreign to the Muscovite political tradition. The Muscovite politicians’ references to the ‘forebears’ of the grand princes and those of the Lviv brethren to the legacy of Volodymyr the Great were framed within somewhat different intellectual conceptions. If Muscovite diplomacy asserted that the lands of Rus’ were the patrimony of Moscow’s grand princes, thereby stressing the dynastic rights of their princes to particular territories, the members of the Lviv Brotherhood traced a direct line of descent from Prince Volodymyr to Tsar Fedor Ivanovich in order to emphasize the role of the tsar not as the owner of certain lands but as leader of the ‘Rus’ race’ and patron of the Orthodox Church. Thus, instead of stressing patrimonial elements, their letter gave primacy to notions of ethnic and religious affinity between Polish- Lithuanian and Muscovite Rus’.

The views of Ruthenian society on the problem of the unity of Rus’, as represented in the letter of the Lviv brethren, reflected the political, so­cial, and religious circumstances and atmosphere prevailing in Ukraine in the second half of the sixteenth century. In their letter to the tsar, the members of the Lviv Brotherhood were largely continuing the intellec­tual tradition elaborated by the learned circle surrounding Prince Kos- tiantyn Ostrozky. The cult of St Volodymyr as baptizer of Rus’ and builder of churches, the conception of the ‘nation of Rus’ ’ as one that in­cluded a variety of tribes, and, finally, the treatment of the Muscovite tsar as the ‘honorable sovereign and grand prince, brilliantly resplendent in Orthodoxy’—all these elements were already present in the introductions and verses written by Herasym Smotrytsky for the Ostrih Bible of 1581.^[629] This complex of ideas was based on the efforts of the Ruthenian elite to defend the religious and national rights and prerogatives of Ruthenian so­ciety. Those strivings, as well as the tendency that developed in the Com­monwealth to define the nation of Rus’ in ethnic, religious, and political terms, gave rise to the treatment of the problem of Rus’ unity set forth in the letter of the Lviv brethren.

Their ideas on the unity of Rus’ were later developed and adapted to new circumstances by Kyivan Orthodox hierarchs of the 1620s, most not­ably by Metropolitan Iov Boretsky. In a letter of August 1624 to the tsar, the metropolitan presented a most expansive interpretation of the argu­ments advanced by the Lviv brethren on the historical and dynastic rela­tions between Polish-Lithuanian and Muscovite Rus’. In particular, he addressed Mikhail Fedorovich as ‘this tsar descended from tsars, off­spring and kin of the great autocrats of all Rus’ ’, who, ‘in liberating his land from invasion, accepted the tsar’s diadem from the right hand of the Almighty and was crowned with the laurel of the great Rus’ state, and clothed in purple’.⁴⁶ Boretsky was in fact continuing the tradition initi­ated by the Lviv letter, but doing so under entirely new circumstances. If the Lviv brethren associated the last Muscovite tsar of the Riuryk dynasty with Volodymyr, which was entirely correct from the genealogical view­point, Boretsky applied the honorific ‘offspring and kin of the great auto­crats of all Rus’ ’ to Mikhail Romanov, who was not descended from the Riurykides.

⁴⁶ VUR, 1: 47.

It is difficult to determine whether Boretsky consciously permitted himself this obvious inaccuracy and error in order to win the tsar’s favor or whether it was due to simple ignorance of the circumstances that had brought Mikhail Fedorovich to the throne. All that can be said with cer­tainty is that on the issue of the descent of the Romanovs, the metropol­itan followed the official Muscovite line.^[630] In some measure, Boretsky’s letter marked the beginning of the subsequent Kyivan tradition that would treat the Romanovs as ‘relations’ of Prince Volodymyr. In 1640, when Petro Mohyla sent a delegation to Moscow to entreat alms for the reconstruction of St Sophia’s Cathedral, it was clearly with the intention of gaining the favor of the tsarist administration that he transferred some of St Volodymyr’s relics to Moscow and called on the tsar to honor the memory of his ‘ancestor’.^[631] The tradition of treating the Romanovs as des­cendants of the Riurykides also manifested itself at the Council of Pereiaslav in 1654.

The important aspect of Boretsky’s letter to the tsar was that he con­tinued the tradition, reflected in the 1592 letter of the Lviv brethren to the tsar, of treating Polish-Lithuanian and Muscovite Rus’ as ethnically re­lated entities. Even as Boretsky employed the idea of the historical and dynastic continuity of Rus’, he spoke of the kinship ties between the two peoples. His point of departure was the biblical story of two brothers, Joseph and Benjamin.^[632] This was a rather popular subject in Kyiv at the time and served as the basis for a school drama that was staged success­fully at the Kyiv Mohyla College in the 1630s.^[633] According to the biblical account, Joseph, who was sold into Egyptian slavery by his brothers and attained a position of eminence in that country, later took a magnani­mous attitude toward his siblings, especially Benjamin. The Kyivan met­ropolitan compared the Muscovite tsar with Joseph and referred to his countrymen as ‘related in flesh’ and ‘related in spirit’ to the subjects of the tsar, employing the same term, rosyiskyi, both for the name of the Muscovite state and for denoting the Ruthenian population of the Com­monwealth. He called upon the tsar: ‘take thought for us as well, people of the same birth as your Rus' tribe [rosyiskaho ty plemeny Iedynoutrobnym liudem]... take thought as well for our holy Mother Church, which is in our land, and for us, your younger brethren...'.51 In fact, Boretsky was proposing that the tsar treat his relations with Polish-Lithuanian Rus' not only in dynastic terms but in religious and ethnic ones as well. Boretsky's letter, with its images taken from the Bible, helped to establish the trad­ition of viewing the Little Russians (Ukrainians) and the Great Russians (Russians) as brothers who together constituted a family.

Important data on the attitude toward Moscow in Ruthenian society of the 1620s are also to be gleaned from Isaia Kopynsky's letter of Decem­ber 1622 to the patriarch of Moscow. Of particular interest in this letter, which became the ‘first swallow' in relations between the Kyivan clergy and Moscow, is the use of the terms ‘Little' and ‘Great' Rus', revived in Ukraine at the time. Kopynsky refers to Patriarch Filaret (Romanov) of Moscow as patriarch of Great and Little Rus' and to himself as bishop and exarch of Little Rus'.5² This is, in fact, the first known attempt to in­clude a mention of Little Rus' in the title of the patriarch of Moscow, and potentially the first attempt to extend his authority to Little Rus', that is, all or part of the Kyivan metropolitanate. It is worth noting that the ini­tiative in this matter was taken by Orthodox Rus', although the goal was still a limited one—that of justifying a Ruthenian Orthodox bishop's de­cision to change his allegiance ‘in the name of the tsar'.

The general use of the terms ‘Little and Great Rus'' in the Kyivan metropolitanate owed a good deal to the Greeks and the Eastern patriarchs. For supporting evidence of this, we may look not only to the letter written by the Lviv brethren in 1592 but also to the work of Ivan Vyshensky, an Orthodox monk and opponent of the Union who spent many years at Mount Athos and was one of the first to employ the term ‘Little Rus'' in his writings. Patriarch Theophanes also used it in the pastoral letter that he issued in January 1621, on the eve of his departure from the Kyivan metropolitanate.⁵³ The pro-Muscovite orientation of many of the newly consecrated bishops, which was justified by the idea of the ethnic and religious unity of Muscovite and Polish-Lithuanian Rus', gave a new impulse to the usage of the ‘Little and Great Rus'' terminology.

In his Palinode, Zakhariia Kopystensky wrote of Great and Little Rus' as constituent parts of the Rus' nation, which was considered to have de­scended from Japheth, a son of Noah who had inherited the North as ^[634] his domain. He also stressed the religious unity of the two Rus' nations, emphasizing that ‘the Muscovites had ecclesiastic communion with our Ruthenians both when our people came to Moscow and when their en­voys visited Lithuania and the Crown Land'.^[635] In his Protestation, Iov Boretsky made mention of the Muscovites (Muscovy), ‘with whom we share one faith and worship, one origin, language, and customs'.^[636] The stress on the historical, religious, ethnic, and cultural elements of unity was thus an important component of the Little Russian idea developed by the Kyivan clergy. It signaled the beginning of the formation of a new identity that developed in response to the challenge issued to Orthodox Rus' by the Union and by the royal administration—an identity that pro­vided for the creation of a broader cultural self-definition based on the unification of Polish-Lithuanian Rus' with Muscovite Rus'. But was Muscovite Rus', rooted in its dynastic and patrimonial way of thinking, prepared to accept such a vision of unity?

The Last Bastion of Orthodoxy

By all accounts, the idea of the religious and ethnic affinity of Polish-Lithuanian Rus' with Muscovite Rus', advanced in the writings of the bishops consecrated by Theophanes, did not find ready acceptance in contemporary Muscovy. After the lengthy Time of Troubles, with its at­tendant foreign intervention, the prevailing mood in the Muscovite Orthodox Church was one of self-isolation, suspicion, and vigilance toward the surrounding world.^[637] The times when Muscovite clergymen could address Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky as a ‘Christian lord of eminent virtue' and call upon him to ‘rejoice and be glad that our true and immaculate Christian faith remains firm and unshakable’,^[638] as they had done following the overthrow of the First False Dmitrii and the election of Vasilii Shuisky as tsar in 1606, seemed gone forever. Satan appeared to have established his dominion in neighboring lands. As the author of the Kazan Relation wrote of Grigorii Otrepev (the First False Dmitrii) soon after 1610, ‘on seeing the light, he, the accursed one, fled into the dark­ness to Poland’.^[639]

During the Time of Troubles, the view was propagated in Muscovy that opponents of the regime in power, whether Orthodox or not, were enemies of the Orthodox faith. The close association in the minds of con­temporaries between spiritual and temporal authorities made it possible to treat the tsar’s opponents as enemies of the Orthodox faith in general. Interesting in this regard are the proclamations issued by Patriarch Ger- mogen, an ally of Tsar Vasilii Shuisky, who described the insurgents led by Ivan Bolotnikov as ‘bandits who have fallen away from the Christian faith and murderers of Christians’. He accused them of ‘desecrating holy icons and utterly despoiling holy churches’, counterposing to them ‘all Orthodox Christians’, as he called those who supported Shuisky.^[640] The author of The Other Relation, which appeared in the 1620s, also con­sidered Bolotnikov and Ilia Gorchakov (a pretender who styled himself the Tsarevich Peter) enemies of the Orthodox faith.^[641] The very fact of rebellion against the ruling tsar was sufficient grounds, in the eyes of the Muscovite elites, to accuse the rebels of wishing to destroy the whole Orthodox community of faith.

According to this logic, the establishment of Mikhail Romanov’s rule in Moscow and the gradual consolidation of his power on the periphery of the state automatically made the whole population not only subjects of the tsar but also ‘Orthodox Christians’. ‘Traitors’, by contrast, were ex­pelled from or remained beyond the borders of the state. In the summer of 1616, after the resumption of hostilities between the Commonwealth and Muscovy, the tsar ordered that infiltrators be sent to appeal to ‘Rus­sian people [russkie liudi]’ in the Polish-Lithuanian army, having regard for God and the Orthodox faith, not to spill Christian blood and to join the tsar’s forces. In the appeal from the sobor of Moscow hierarchs that the infiltrators were to distribute, the addressees were treated as ‘traitors’ to the faith and termed ‘Orthodox Christians who have cut yourselves off from salvation, working in the kingdom of the Polish state’. ‘Do not flat­ter yourself’, said the appeal, ‘that you are Christians: if the four corners of the earth cry out against those who consort with the pope, then how should you be Christians, worshipping the beast...?’^[642]

Couched in such terms, the proclamation of the Moscow hierarchs could hardly convince its readers to go over to the Muscovite side, but for present purposes, the more important point is the conviction of its authors that the ‘Russian people’ on the Polish-Lithuanian side could not be ‘Christians’. It is also noteworthy that the authors of the appeal (un­like Germogen in his charters) derived the ‘un-Christianity’ of their ad­dressees not so much from the fact that they were fighting against the tsar (‘voluntarily and involuntarily you are serving those who seek our demise’) as from their alleged subordination to the pope. In their appeal, the hierarchs offer a choice between ‘the patriarchs with the whole ec­umene’ and ‘the West with the pope’ and counsel their addressees to read the anti-papist works of Cyril of Jerusalem, Stefan Zyzanii, and Meletios of Antioch. The fact that the hierarchs addressed themselves to the ‘Rus­sian people’ effectively excludes the possibility, raised by some scholars, that the document was actually an appeal of the Muscovite government to the Ukrainians and Belarusians of the Commonwealth and signaled the beginning of a new stage in Muscovite foreign policy.^[643] As is apparent from the official correspondence of the temporal and spiritual authorities in Muscovy, as well as from political writings issued at the time, the ethnonym russkie/ruskie (Russian) was used exclusively to denote the subjects of the Muscovite tsar, while the Ruthenian subjects of the Com­monwealth were termed ‘Polish’ or ‘Lithuanian’ people, Belarusians, or ‘Cherkasians’ if they were Cossacks.^[644]

The hierarchs threatened their addressees with ‘eternal damnation’ and noted that there would be no salvation for them from ‘representatives of the Russian Church’, which, once again, according to contemporary Muscovite practice, could only have meant the Moscow patriarchate. The fact that the sobor of hierarchs referred first to the Moscow miracle workers Petr, Aleksei, and Iona also indicates that most likely the proc­lamation was directed to former subjects of the Tsardom of Muscovy, in­cluding nobles and other inhabitants of those territories of the Smolensk and Chernihiv regions who had found themselves under Commonwealth rule as a result of the Time of Troubles. As there are no grounds to speak of the presence of Catholicism or the Union in those territories in the 1620s, it may be assumed that the sobor of hierarchs considered the ‘Russian people’ in the Commonwealth forces ‘un-Christian’ because of their service to the Catholic monarch and state.

It should nevertheless be acknowledged that in early seventeenth­century Muscovy there was more than one definition of a Christian. On one level, as noted, allegiance to the ‘true Christian faith’ was limited to the subjects of the Muscovite tsar. On another level, sixteenth-century Muscovy also understood that there were Orthodox outside the boundaries of Muscovy and exalted the role of Muscovite grand princes and tsars as the sole independent Orthodox sovereigns, as is particularly apparent from the monk Filofei’s well-known remarks on Moscow as the Third Rome.⁶⁴ The Muscovite administration gladly availed itself of the services of Patriarch Theophanes of Jerusalem in 1619 in order to consecrate its new patriarch, Filaret (Romanov).

The Muscovite elites’ recognition that they belonged to the broader Orthodox world did not imply, however, that they considered that world entirely equal to themselves or above suspicion of heresy. This applied both to their attitude toward the ‘Greeks’, that is, the Eastern hierarchs and clergymen, and to Orthodox from the Commonwealth. Doubts about the probity of the latter increased particularly during the adminis­tration of Patriarch Filaret. Having spent eight years in Polish captivity, including a lengthy period at the court of the former Orthodox magnate Lew Sapieha, who had converted to Catholicism, Filaret was well

(ibid., p. 190). Cf. the use of the terms ‘Polish’, ‘Lithuanian’, ‘Cherkasian’, and ‘Russian’ in Muscovite diplomatic documents pertaining to Commonwealth-Muscovite relations in 1646-7: RGADA, fond 79 (‘Relations with Poland’), no. 69, ff. 95, 95^v; no. 72, ff. 2, 103^v, 239^v, 242^v, 247^v; no. 75, ff. 290-300.

⁶⁴For the most recent discussion of the complex of ideas known as the ‘Third Rome theory’, see Donald Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304-1589 (Cambridge, UK, 1998), pp. 219-43; N. V. Sinitsyna, Tretii Rim: istoki i evoliutsiia russkoisrednevekovoi kontseptsii (XV-XVIIvv.) (Moscow, 1998). For a survey of literature on the topic, see David M. Goldfrank, ‘Moscow, the Third Rome’ in The Modern Encyclopedia of Rus­sian and Soviet History, ed. Joseph L. Wieczynski (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1981), 23: 118-21. informed about the details of the religious struggle in the Common­wealth, where, as he later wrote, ‘I saw many ecclesiastical disagreements among them’. The very fact of the coexistence of Orthodox with Catholics and Protestants and the religious pluralism prevailing in the Commonwealth was not only unprecedented in Filaret’s experience but also proof that the Orthodox of the Commonwealth were not maintain­ing the true Orthodox faith.^[645] In a way it was another expression of the views adopted by the Moscow hierarchs in 1616 with regard to the ‘Rus­sian people’ in the Polish-Lithuanian army.

Filaret’s attitude to the Orthodox of the Commonwealth was fully ap­parent in his ‘Ukase on How To Investigate and on the Belarusians Themselves’, which became one of the resolutions of the Moscow sobor of 1620. The very title of this ukase is interesting, since it referred to the Orthodox of the Ukrainian and Belarusian territories not in political terms (‘Polish’ or ‘Lithuanian’ people), as was standard practice in Mus­covite documents, but in ethnic terms as ‘Belarusians’. Defining them in religious terms (for example, as ‘Christians’), as the text of the ukase it­self makes clear, was simply impossible: the Orthodoxy or, in Muscovite terms, the ‘Christianity’ of Polish-Lithuanian Rus’ had been corrupted not only by the dominance of Catholicism and Protestantism in the Com­monwealth but also by the Union of Brest, which Filaret termed ‘walking two paths’. In the ukase, the combination of Orthodox (‘Christian’) rit­ual and jurisdictional allegiance to Rome was characterized as follows: ‘... they have a church, though Christian, yet they pray to God for the pope, and that church of theirs is called the Union’.^[646]

The Orthodox of the Commonwealth were also suspected of ‘pouring’, that is, of performing the sacrament of baptism by the pouring of water, as was the practice in the Catholic Church, and not by triple immersion in water, as in Muscovite Rus’, though in fact even the Uniates did not prac­tice pouring, to say nothing of the Orthodox of the Commonwealth in the early 1620s. The Moscow sobor of 1620 passed a resolution requiring those who had been ‘poured’ to be rebaptized if they settled in Muscovy. The resolutions of the sobor of 1620 concerning rebaptism were inspired by the rejection of the previous ‘flexible’ practice of admitting converts to Orthodoxy by confirmation, without requiring them to be rebaptized, as had been the case with Maryna Mniszech (Marina Mnishek), the wife of the First False Dmitrii, and several Commonwealth noblemen thereafter. The sobor resolved that Catholics must be rebaptized, which meant that they were not considered Christians to begin with. This applied to Protes­tants as well. As for the Orthodox, rebaptism was required not only for those who had been ‘poured’ but also for those whose priests offered prayers for the pope (that is, Uniates or those baptized by an Orthodox priest who subsequently converted to the Union) and those who took communion in a Catholic church. Even an Orthodox who was above sus­picion with respect to all the above circumstances could only be accepted into the Muscovite Church after making an act of contrition.

The sobor’s resolution with regard to those who had been ‘poured’ cast doubt not only on the Orthodoxy of Polish-Lithuanian Rus’ but even on its status as a Christian land. In effect, only those who lived in a purely Orthodox state and were not corrupted by contact with non-Orthodox could claim to be true Christians.^[647] The only such state was the Tsardom of Muscovy, hence the Muscovite vocabulary of the day (in which the word ‘Christian’ became synonymous with ‘Orthodox’) reflected the prevailing view of the outside world, which held that there was no Chris­tianity outside the bounds of Muscovite Orthodoxy.^[648] When the sobor of 1620 took place, there was no officially recognized Orthodox Church in the Commonwealth, and the Orthodox Kyivan metropolitanate had ceased to exist not only de jure but also de facto until the autumn of 1620. Muscovite suspicions concerning the quality of Orthodoxy among Ukrainians and Belarusians showed no appreciable change even after the restoration of the Kyivan metropolitanate by Patriarch Theophanes. Even as Zakhariia Kopystensky referred in his Palinode to the religious affinity between Polish-Lithuanian Rus' and Muscovy, that affinity was resolutely denied in Moscow. In the 1620s, the rebaptizing of Orthodox emigrants from the Kyivan metropolitanate to Muscovy proceeded apace, without regard to numerous embassies and trips by Kyivan hier­archs to Moscow, and the efforts of Kyivan theologians to obtain approval of their works and publish them in Moscow met with suspicion.

In 1624, when the Kyivan bookman Pamva Berynda presented four books printed in Kyiv to the tsar and the patriarch in Moscow, his gift was accepted with thanks and rewarded with alms, but his proposals for joint publications were rejected.⁶⁹ The attitude of the Muscovite ‘censors' to the theological innovations of the Kyivan metropolitanate, as well as the dangers awaiting Kyivan authors in Moscow, are well exemplified by Lavrentii Zyzanii's sojourn in Moscow in 1626-7 for the purpose of pub­lishing his catechism. Although Patriarch Filaret ultimately approved the catechism, Zyzanii was suspected by his translators and censors of prop­agating Arianism (in his definition of the essence of the Holy Trinity), of making use of secular philosophical ideas (on the structure of the uni­verse), and of succumbing to the influence of recent Greek translations and writings. Zyzanii found it expedient to agree with almost every point made by his opponents. He asserted several times that he had come to Moscow for the express purpose of receiving instruction in the faith, but, judging by the logic of the discussions in which he participated, his capitulation cannot have been entirely sincere. After having spent nine months in Moscow, Zyzanii most probably feared a charge of heresy, with all the consequences implicit in such an accusation.⁷⁰

⁶⁹See Kharlampovich, Malorossiiskoe vliianie, p. 102; Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus’, 7: 410. See Iov Boretsky’s letter commending Berynda to the Muscovite tsar and patriarch in VUR, 1: 48-9. On Berynda’s proposal of joint publications, see Oparina, IvanNasedka, p. 64. Among the books presented by Berynda was the latest Kyivan publication, the Besidy na Diianiia Svi- atykh Apostol (Discourses on the Acts of the Holy Apostles) ofJohn Chrysostom. Together with Iosyf Sviatohorets, Pamva Berynda corrected the translation of the Discourses made by Havryil Dorofeiovych. See the description of this publication in Zapasko and Isaievych, Pam”iatky knyzhkovoho mystetstva, vol. 1, no. 139.

⁷⁰ For the minutes of the Moscow censors’ discussion with Zyzanii, see ‘Prenie litovskogo protopopa Lavrentiia Zizaniia s igumenon Illeiu i spravshchikom Grigoriem po povodu is- pravleniia sostavlennogo Lavrentiem katekhizisa’ in Letopisirusskoi literatury idrevnosti, ed. N. S. Tikhonravov, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1859). General accounts of the discussion are given in the fol­lowing works: Kharlampovich, Malorossiiskoe vliianie, pp. 103-7; Frick, ‘Zyzanij and Smotryc’kyj’, pp. 67-93; id., ‘Misrepresentations, Misunderstandings, and Silences’, pp. 160-3.

Zyzanii may have been aware of the fate of Maksim Grek and Isaia of Kamianets, who were

The discussion concerning the translation of Zyzanii’s catechism gives a good idea of the ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences separating Muscovite and Polish-Lithuanian Rus’. The Muscovite censors of the catechism, which was written not in Church Slavonic but in Ruthenian (Old Ukrainian), noted that they did not understand the language, and Filaret’s principal representative in the discussion, Prince Ivan Boriso­vich Cherkassky, who was influential at court, termed the language of the catechism ‘Lithuanian’. At times, Muscovite participants in the discus­sion referred to it as ‘Polish’.⁷¹ The ethnonym ‘Belarusians’, employed in the title of the ukase issued by the sobor of 1620, evidently had not be­come current in Muscovite government circles as an appellation for Ukrainians and Belarusians, and was clearly less popular than the polit­ical terms ‘Polish’ and ‘Lithuanian’ people.⁷²

The fate of the Moscow edition of Zyzanii’s catechism is also instruct­ive. It was finally published, with appropriate changes, in Moscow in Jan­uary 1627, but almost the entire press run was confiscated on Filaret’s orders. The Kyivan cleric’s attempt to secure the approval of Moscow (and, by extension, of the broader Orthodox world) for his ‘Confession of Faith’ ended in utter failure. Kyiv’s offer to work toward confessional unity of the two Orthodox entities was, in fact, rejected in Moscow. The year 1627 also saw the first prohibition of a Kyivan publication in Moscow. This was Kyryl Tranquillon-Stavrovetsky’s Didactic Gospel, which had earlier been condemned by the Kyivan metropolitanate.⁷³ Sev­eral score copies of the gospel were burned in Moscow in December 1627, and the tsar and patriarch forbade their subjects to buy ‘Lithu­anian’ books. Works of theology from Kyivan (‘Lithuanian’) printshops were confiscated by voevodas from churches and from laymen residing in border towns and subsequently dispatched to Moscow. Some of them,

imprisoned in Moscow in the sixteenth century. The case of Iosyf Kurtsevych, who was allowed to correspond with his countrymen only under the supervision of Muscovite censorship, might have served Zyzanii as a more immediate example of Muscovite ‘solicitude’ for foreign clerics (see Kharlampovich, Malorossiiskoe vliianie, p. 103).

⁷¹ See Frick, ‘Zyzanij and Smotryc’kyj’, p. 75.

⁷²It should be noted nevertheless that Muscovite scribes used different words with reference to letters received from the Commonwealth in the Polish and Ruthenian languages. Letters writ­ten in Ruthenian were generally marked as copied from a Belarusian text (spisok s beloruskogo lista), and only occasionally as translated from the Belarusian (perevods lista beloruskogopis'ma). Copies of Polish-language letters were marked exclusively as translations. For numerous ex­amples of this practice, see VUR, vols. 1-3. For an example of the word ‘translation’ used with reference to a letter written in Ruthenian, see VUR, vol. 3, no. 213. For examples of the clear distinction made by Muscovite diplomats between the Polish, ‘Belarusian’, and ‘Russian’ lan­guages, see the records of Vasilii Streshnev’s mission to the Commonwealth (1646): RGADA, fond 79 (‘Relations with Poland’), no. 71, f. 266ff.

⁷³The ban on the Didactic Gospel in Moscow was in part the direct result of a negative ‘review’ written by a Kyivan cleric. For details, see Kharlampovich, Malorossiiskoe vliianie, pp. 108-12. including Tranquillon-Stavrovetsky’s Didactic Gospel, were later sold ‘abroad’, that is, in Ukraine and Belarus, by Muscovite agents.⁷⁴

Regardless of Moscow’s suspicions about the purity of the faith in Pol­ish-Lithuanian Rus’, the Muscovite authorities never broke off their con­tacts with the restored Kyivan metropolitanate and the Zaporozhian Cossacks. They continued to supply alms for the maintenance of Ortho­dox churches, monasteries, and brotherhoods,⁷⁵ and took an interest in the course of the religious struggle in the Commonwealth, without deny­ing that the Orthodox of that state belonged to the Christian community. For example, in May 1616 Muscovite voevodas reported to Moscow about the struggle between the ‘Poles’ and ‘Christians’ in the Common­wealth, noting that the Poles ‘have desecrated many Christian churches and established Catholic churches... and, seeing this, the Christians sent seven of their princes to Cherkasy so that the Poles would not destroy their faith, so that they might stand as one against the Poles’.⁷⁶ In the spring of 1620, the secretary Ivan Gramotin specifically inquired of the Cossack embassy to Moscow whether the Polish king ‘wanted to violate their faith’ and whether there was ‘any threat to... their faith’.⁷⁷

The most interesting and ironic aspect of Gramotin’s question was that a mere two years earlier, when the Cossacks under the leadership of Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny had taken part in the Commonwealth cam­paign against Muscovy, they had been represented in proclamations is­sued by the tsar himself as ‘destroyers of the Christian faith’.⁷⁸ Calling on the Don Cossacks to attack the Zaporozhians, who were then raiding Muscovite territory, Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich wrote:

If only the Zaporozhian Cherkasians destroy the Polish [i.e. located on the Mus­covite border with the Kingdom of Poland] towns... our Christian faith will be defeated in those places, and the godly churches and the monasteries, where the graves of your ancestors are located and where you yourselves have made dona­tions for the salvation of your souls, everything will be destroyed and no memory will remain.⁷⁹

Addressing another detachment of Russian Cossacks, the tsar called on them ‘to serve for the holy churches of God and for the holy true

⁷⁴ See the report of the voevoda of Rylsk on the matter, dated 12 December 1630, in VUR, i: 90-2. The prohibition on reading Kyivan publications applied even to such highly placed ‘em­igrants in the name of the tsar’ as Archbishop Iosyf Kurtsevych of Suzdal. In 1629 he was obliged to explain himself to the tsar for having accepted a printed book from Ukraine (see Kharlam- povich, Malorossiiskoe vliianie, pp. 103, 112-13).

⁷⁵See correspondence of the latter half of the 1620s between Orthodox in the Common­wealth and Moscow concerning donations to churches, monasteries, and brotherhoods (VUR, vol. 1, nos. 25, 33, 34, 41, 42).

⁷⁶ DRA, p. 92; cf. p. 100.

⁷⁷ See documents concerning the sojourn of the Cossack mission headed by Petro Odynets in Moscow, ibid., p. 246; VUR, 1: 3-7, 14-15.

⁷⁸ DRA, pp. 161, 162, 165. ⁷⁹ Ibid., p. 133.

Orthodox Christian faith. And for us and for all Christendom against the Lithuanian people and the Cherkasians'.^[649] Clearly, as in the case of the ‘Russian people' of the letter written by the Moscow hierarchs in 1616, the ‘Cherkasians' ceased to be considered Christians when they took up arms against the Muscovite tsar. But as soon as hostilities ended and the Ukrainian Cossacks offered their services to the tsar, as in their embassy of 1620, they were considered to have returned to the ‘Christian' fold, and Muscovite diplomats even inquired whether they were suffering reli­gious oppression at the hands of the Polish king.

It would appear that there were two competing tendencies in Mus­covite foreign policy, an ‘idealistic' or super-Orthodox one that recog­nized no true Christianity beyond the boundaries of the tsar's realm, and a more pragmatic current that sought potential allies in the non-Catholic world and strove to derive benefit for the Muscovite state from Orthodox opposition to the Catholic authorities of the Commonwealth. In line with this second tendency, the Orthodox of the Commonwealth seemed suffi­ciently right-minded to deserve the tsar's support and assistance.^[650] When a Kyivan delegation headed by Bishop Isaakii Boryskovych held negoti­ations in Moscow in January 1625 and, complaining about the persecu­tion of the Orthodox, put the question about Muscovite assistance to the Cossacks and the extension of the tsar's protection to them, Prince Cherkassky and secretary Gramotin did not reject the idea of Moscow's intervention in the affairs of a neighboring state in order to defend Orthodoxy. Still, Moscow was not yet prepared for conflict with the Commonwealth, and the delegation was refused military assistance on the grounds that, according to Muscovite documentation, ‘that idea is not yet established among you yourselves and there is as yet no unanim­ity among you on that score'. Despite the negative answer, the Kyivan clergymen were assured that ‘His Tsarist Majesty and the Most Holy Pa­triarch will consider how to see the Orthodox faith and the godly churches and all of you delivered from the heretics'.^[651]

The appropriate time for ‘deliverance', in the view of the Muscovite authorities, evidently arrived in the autumn of 1630. At that time, Mus­covy was preparing for a new war with the Commonwealth, and it was decided at the tsar's court to take the path already indicated by Swedish diplomacy and exploit the religious factor by enlisting Ukrainian Cossackdom on the side of Moscow. It is worth noting that in their rela­tions with the Cossacks, who took either a pro-Polish or anti-Polish pos­ition, depending on circumstances, Muscovite circles sought to avoid direct contact, using the Kyivan clergy as intermediaries.^[652] They were the agents chosen to transmit proclamations from the tsar and letters from the Eastern patriarchs with appeals to ‘make obeisance’ to the tsar of Muscovy.^[653] These documents were important indications of the readi­ness of the Muscovite court to play the Orthodox and Cossack cards in their conflict with the Commonwealth, but the practical effect of their ac­tion ultimately proved minimal. Isaakii Boryskovych, who happened to obtain the documents after Boretsky’s death, gave them to Petro Mohyla, who did not send them on to the Cossacks and allegedly said to Andrii Boretsky, who made inquiries about them, ‘You deserve to be impaled for meddling with those proclamations.’^[654]

During the Smolensk War of 1632-4, initiated from the Muscovite side by Patriarch Filaret himself, the Muscovite government attempted, if not to win the Ukrainian Cossacks over to its side, then at least to neutralize them. Even before beginning military operations, it instructed the voevo- das not to harass the local population on the other side of the border (as was the usual practice before the outbreak of war), but, on the contrary, to attempt to gain its sympathy for the tsar. In January 1633, an order was even sent from Moscow to the Chernihiv region, then occupied by Mus­covite troops, forbidding Muscovy’s local allies to attack the ‘Cherkasian towns’, as the ‘Cherkasians are standing up for the faith against the heretics... and because of that, they are engaged even now in great battles with the Polish people’.^[655] Religious agitation and the cautious line of Muscovite policy did indeed influence the early stages of the Smolensk War, but could not prevent the Cossacks from taking part in the war in its decisive stage.

At first the Cossacks sought to avoid participating in battles against Muscovite troops, thereby exerting pressure on the Commonwealth and demanding the election to the Polish throne of Prince Wladyslaw, who was favorably inclined toward them.^[656] After Wladyslaw’s election, how­ever, the situation changed, and the Cossacks became fully engaged in the war with Muscovy. Moreover, Filaret’s religious propaganda ultim­ately had negative consequences for Moscow. As discussed earlier, seek­ing to counteract Muscovite religious propaganda and requiring Cossack assistance and loyalty in the looming war with its eastern neighbor, the Commonwealth government proved more flexible with regard to the ‘accommodation of the citizens of the Greek faith’ and, as noted earlier, permitted the legalization of the Orthodox hierarchy. This change of policy proved deleterious to Muscovy not only because of active Cossack participation in the Smolensk War on the side of the Commonwealth but also because of the removal from the Kyivan metropolitanate of Isaia Kopynsky, who favored Moscow, and his replacement by Petro Mohyla, who blessed the Cossacks for war with Orthodox Muscovy.

The loss of the Smolensk War by Muscovy, the legalization of the Orthodox hierarchy in the Commonwealth, and the consolidation of Mohyla’s status as Kyivan metropolitan led to the cooling of relations between Kyiv and Moscow. Nor did the death of Patriarch Filaret im­prove relations between the two Orthodox centers, as might have been expected. His policy toward the Orthodox Ukrainians and Belarusians was continued, only with more consistency in certain respects, and with no real hope of exploiting the religious factor in a future war with the Commonwealth, as had been the case during the old patriarch’s incum­bency. The continuation of the established policy is also apparent in the publication in 1639 of a Service Book that included the text of the ‘Ukase on How to Investigate and on the Belarusians Themselves’. In the Service Book, Filaret’s stand on the non-recognition of non-Orthodox baptism was also supported by an argument of Kyivan provenance—the reprint­ing of the Cave Monastery edition of the Nomocanon, certain articles of which recommended the rebaptism of converts to Orthodoxy.^[657] Thus Kyiv’s own publications were used against it.

The attitude of Muscovite officialdom toward Kyiv began to change only in the mid-1640s. The accession to the throne of the new tsar, Alek­sei Mikhailovich, in 1645 increased the influence in church affairs of the tsar’s spiritual mentor, Stefan Vonifatiev, who opposed the influence of Patriarch Iosif, the representative of the traditional line. Vonifatiev sur­rounded himself with a circle (including the future Patriarch Nikon) that began with a struggle for the ‘old worship’ and gradually undertook a program of reforming Muscovite Orthodoxy, which set it on the road to confessionalization by bringing it into line with the practices then pre­vailing in the Kyivan metropolitanate and the Greek East. The new course of the Moscow elites was not spontaneous, but was prepared by the acquaintance of the Muscovite ‘Westernizers’ of the 1620s and 1630s, including Prince Ivan Khvorostinin and the poets of the Printing Office, with contemporary Ruthenian writings.^[658]

One of the first signs of the changes that began to be implemented by the Muscovite elites with respect to the theological teachings of the Kyi- van metropolitanate was the publication in Moscow in 1648 of a manu­script collection of Kyivan provenance based on the Book of Faith of Azarii and the Palinode of Zakhariia Kopystensky, to whom Azarii’s work is also sometimes attributed. The same year saw the publication of an­other Kyivan work, a grammar of Church Slavonic by Meletii Smotryt- sky: the title page omitted the name of the author, who had converted to the Union. In 1649, the Brief Compendium of Teachings about the Articles of the Faith, compiled in Kyiv by Petro Mohyla and Isaia Trofymovych- Kozlovsky, was published in Moscow. The text followed that of the Kyiv edition of 1645. Moscow was in fact accepting the Kyivan ‘confession of faith’ and opening the door to the creation of a future confessional union of the Kyivan and Muscovite churches.^[659]

Quite symptomatic of contemporary Muscovite attitudes toward Kyivan Orthodoxy were the ways in which the authorities treated the Orthodox Ruthenian Adam Kysil in the course of his embassy to Moscow in 1647. The border voevodas were informed by Moscow that Kysil belonged to the ‘Christian Orthodox faith of the Greek rite (zakon) and could therefore be allowed to worship in Orthodox churches as he made his way to the capital. The only limitation imposed on Kysil and his co-religionists in the diplomatic party was a prohibition on visiting cathedrals in the cities. This was probably more a manifestation of a quid pro quo policy toward Commonwealth officials, whose government allegedly prohibited the Muscovite envoys to visit Orthodox cathedrals in Poland-Lithuania, than of religious discrimination against Ruthenian Orthodox believers. Even that restriction was later lifted, as Kysil and the Orthodox clergymen and nobles accompanying him were allowed to attend a service in the Dormition Cathedral of the Kremlin, where they received blessings from Patriarch Iosif of Moscow. Muscovite thinking of the period was typified by the fact that the Muscovite scribes who reported on visits by Kysil and other Ruthenian Orthodox to the Dormition Cathedral made no connection between their religious affiliation and their ethnic identity, referring to them as Poles.^[660]

No less important an indication of change was Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich’s apparent response to the proposals for cooperation made by Kyivan clergymen in previous decades. In the autumn of 1648, he re­quested that Bishop Zosyma Prokopovych of Chernihiv send two monas­tic teachers, Arsenii Satanovsky and Damaskyn Ptytsky, to Moscow. Then he repeated the same request in a letter to the Kyivan metropolitan, Sylvestr Kosov, noting particularly that

the teachers, the holy monks Arsenii and Damian Ptytsky know Holy Scripture and are familiar with the Greek language, and are capable of translating from the Greek language to Slavonic, and have a sufficient knowledge of Latin, and such people are suitable to Our Tsarist Majesty.^[661]

As another contemporary Muscovite document indicates, the question at hand was that of ‘correcting the Greek Bibles into Slavonic’.^[662] Two monks, Arsenii Satanovsky and Iepyfanii Slavynetsky, were duly dis­patched by Kosov and arrived in Moscow by August 1649.^[663] This was truly the beginning of a new era in Moscow’s attitude toward Kyivan Orthodoxy. The ‘universalization’ of Muscovite Orthodoxy and its return to the larger Orthodox world it had previously abandoned re­quired the correction of Muscovite service books according to the Greek ‘originals’, and the Kyivan theologians’ assistance was most opportune for that purpose.

As noted earlier, the Muscovite approach to the Orthodox ecumene was characterized by two competing tendencies that battled one another in the course of the seventeenth century. The first was marked by open­ness to foreign Orthodoxy and manifested itself in the continuing support given by the tsar’s court to Orthodox churches and clergy outside Mus­covy. The other found expression in a policy of isolationism that at its height tended to perceive every Orthodox living in a non-Orthodox state as less than fully Christian. Isolationism flourished after the Time of Troubles, dominating Moscow’s religious attitudes and, to some degree, its political thinking during the tenure of Patriarch Filaret. The policy of openness, on the other hand, was fully manifested during the rule of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich and the tenure of Patriarch Nikon. At that time, Muscovite Orthodoxy not only opened itself to external Orthodox influ­ences, but also reformed its own liturgy and ecclesiastical practices in order to join and later lead the newly confessionalized Orthodox world. Muscovite attitudes toward Kyivan Orthodoxy were largely influenced by the interplay of these two tendencies. If in the 1620s Moscow’s en­trenched hostility toward Kyivan Orthodoxy was associated with its de­fensive reaction to the intervention of the Catholic Commonwealth and Protestant Sweden, the improvement of relations in the 1640s was clearly associated with Moscow’s reassessment of its links with the Orthodox East.

manuscript and was not published until 1968 in Rome; it appeared in Kyiv in 1973. Damaskyn Ptytsky, who was mentioned in the tsar’s letter to the Kyivan metropolitan, came to Moscow in 1650. The Moscow ‘traditionalists’ were openly hostile to the arrival of the Kyivan monks. In 1653, Slavynetsky established a Greco-Latin school in the Chudov Monastery and was an active supporter of Patriarch Nikon’s ecclesiastical reforms. During his twenty-six years in Moscow, he wrote approximately 150 works. The fate of Arsenii Koretsky-Satanovsky was more tragic and indicates the dangers awaiting Kyivan monks in Moscow. In 1653, despite the tsar’s promise that Satanovsky would be allowed to depart freely for Kyiv, he was exiled to a monastery.

On the activity of Slavynetsky and Koretsky-Satanovsky in Moscow, see Kharlampovich, Malarossiiskoe vliianie, pp. 119-46; Eingorn, Ocherki iz istorii Malorossii v XVII veke, pp. 39-40; I. Rotar, Epifanii Slavinetskii, Iiteraturnyi deiateΓ XVII v. (Kyiv, 1900, offprint from KS 19 [1900]: no. 10, pp. 1-38; no. u, pp. 189-217). On Slavynetsky’s role as a preacher in Moscow, see Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia, pp. 152-60; also the introduction by V. V. Nim- chuk to Leksykon latyns'kyiIe. Slavynets'koho. Leksykonsloveno-latyns'kyiIe. Slavynets'koho ta A. Korets'koho-Satanovs'koho, ed. V. V. Nimchuk (Kyiv, 1973), pp. 5-58. On the role of Kyivan monks in the diffusion of humanistic ideas in Muscovy, see Max J. Okenfuss, The Rise and Fall of Latin Humanism in Early-Modern Russia: Pagan Authors, Ukrainians, and the Resiliency of Muscovy (Leiden, New York, and Koln, 1995), pp. 45-63.

Religious Diplomacy

The outbreak of the revolt under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnytsky in the spring of 1648 diverted relations between Muscovy and the Ortho­dox Ruthenians into another channel in which the religious theme be­came closely related to issues of a military and political nature. Depending on the changing fortunes of the uprising, the importance of Muscovite support took on greater or lesser prominence in the Cos­sack-Muscovite dialogue, but the religious theme was always present. While it never dominated relations, it almost always reflected the dynam­ics of negotiations between the Cossacks and the Muscovite authorities.^[664]

The main themes of the subsequent Cossack-Muscovite dialogue were introduced by Khmelnytsky in his very first letter to the tsar, dated 8 June 1648. The religious theme was broached first, preparing the ground for the discussion of specific military and political issues. ‘We have occasion to inform Your Tsarist Majesty of the condition of our ancient Greek faith, as we have long been dying for it and for the freedoms won by our blood and granted by ancient kings, and even now we have no peace from the godless Arians’,^[665] wrote Khmelnytsky. Closer to the end of his mis­sive, the hetman returned to the religious theme: ‘We would wish for our­selves such an autocratic ruler in our land as Your Tsarist Majesty, the Orthodox Christian tsar, if only the eternal prophecy of Christ our Lord would be fulfilled, as everything is in the hands of His divine mercy.’^[666] The means whereby Khmelnytsky proposed to fulfill the ‘prophecy’ were simple: the tsar would attack the Commonwealth with his forces and the Cossacks with theirs. Thus Muscovy was to enter the war with the Com­monwealth on the side of the insurgents, and Khmelnytsky’s references to the Cossacks’ defense of the ‘Greek religion’ and to the ‘prophecy’ con­cerning the establishment of the rule of the Orthodox tsar were to serve as arguments for such armed intervention on the part of Moscow.^[667]

The religious theme was also prominent in Khmelnytsky’s letter to the voevoda of Khotmyzhsk, Semen Bolkhovsky, in which the hetman sought to forestall the possibility of joint action by Muscovy and the Common­wealth against Cossackdom. Khmelnytsky began his letter as follows: ‘We did not expect of His Tsarist Majesty, the Great Tsar, or of you your­self, Orthodox Christians, that you might attack our Christian faith, which is the same as yours, and assist the Poles against us.’^[668] Thus the het­man asserted the principle of the religious unity of Polish-Lithuanian and Muscovite Rus’ and indicated the anomaly of war between co­religionists. Framing the matter in this way probably would have done nothing to advance the hetman’s cause during the tenure of Patriarch Filaret, but times were changing, and Aleksei Mikhailovich subsequently let it be known that he agreed with Khmelnytsky’s assertion about the unity of the faith.

In a draft letter sent by the tsar to the voevoda Nikifor Pleshcheev in July 1648 with orders to copy it and send it to Khmelnytsky under his own name, the tsar’s chancery noted that the Cossacks need not fear attack from Muscovy, nor did Moscow expect any trouble from them, for ‘you are of the same Orthodox faith as we’. Rumors of a Muscovite alliance with the Commonwealth against Khmelnytsky were dismissed as groundless, with the additional comment that ‘this has been suggested to you by some enemy of the Christian faith who thereby wishes to bring about dissension in the Orthodox Christian faith’.^[669] Thus the draft letter accepted Khmelnytsky’s idea of religious commonality without reserva­tion or limit, just as it accepted the new framework for dialogue with the Cossacks, which was now defined not only by the traditional idea of Cos­sack service to the tsar but also by the concept of Orthodox solidarity. Nevertheless, in practical terms, Muscovite policy still endeavored to avoid war with the Polish-Lithuanian state, and in his letters to Khmel­nytsky the tsar called on him to compose his differences with the Com­monwealth ‘so that no more Christian blood may be spilled’.^[670]

The idea of the religious unity of the Orthodox world, which played an important role in establishing a dialogue between Khmelnytsky and Muscovy in the summer of 1648, was reinforced in the hetman’s en­tourage by Patriarch Paisios of Jerusalem toward the end of the year. Just as Patriarch Theophanes had once sought to popularize a confessional at­titude among the Cossacks and forbade them to fight against Orthodox Muscovy, so Paisios now attempted to convince the Cossack hetman that an alliance with the Islamic Tatars would be disastrous, while Muscovy would prove a reliable ally. According to Paisios’s report in Moscow, he reproached the hetman that ‘he, a man of the Orthodox faith, had never­theless allied himself with the infidels and spilled much Christian blood, and yet he could have come to an understanding about this with His Tsarist Majesty’. The hetman had allegedly made the excuse that before his letter could reach the tsar, the Poles would have defeated the Cossacks and destroyed the Orthodox faith, while in fact he had taken joint action with the Tatars to defend the faith.¹⁰² Of course, Khmelnytsky was not about to abandon his alliance with the Crimea, but he was probably more than pleased to hear such agitation from the patriarch on behalf of an Orthodox alliance. In receiving the patriarch and lavishing him with attention, Khmelnytsky was not only seeking to legitimize his newly acquired power, as noted earlier, but also to make use of Paisios’s services in his contacts with Moscow.

Paisios’s sojourn in Moscow was indeed extraordinarily useful to Cos­sack diplomacy. In the first place, the patriarch enabled a Cossack dele­gation led by Colonel Syluian Muzhylovsky to obtain an audience with the tsar that would otherwise have been impossible to arrange. Relations between the two parties were thus raised to the highest diplomatic level. Secondly, Paisios himself proved a dedicated and tireless promoter of an alliance between Khmelnytsky and Moscow.¹⁰³ According to Muscovite documentation about Paisios’s stay in Moscow, Khmelnytsky asked the patriarch above all to convince the tsar to take the Zaporozhian Host ‘under his high hand’ and ‘provide assistance with military men’.¹⁰⁴ the spilling of Christian blood in general, but only of Orthodox blood. In his letters to the tsar, Khmelnytsky also used the term ‘Christians’ with reference to the Orthodox, but in his corres­pondence with representatives of the Commonwealth administration, he used ‘Christian’ in the Western sense, meaning Christians in general, from Orthodox and Catholics to representatives of various branches of Protestantism. Cf. the use of the theme of ‘spilling Christian blood’ in his letters of 1648 in DBKh, nos. 6, 7, 8, 9, 19, 20, 23, 25, 26, 28, etc.

¹⁰² See documents on Paisios’s sojourn in Moscow in VUR, 2: 92.

¹⁰³ Apparently Paisios was dissatisfied with the results of his mission and complained to Arsenii Sukhanov that the tsar had declined to intervene in favor of Khmelnytsky (see Kapterev, Kharakter OtnosheniiRossii kpravoslavnomu Vostoku, p. 357).

¹⁰⁴ VUR, 2: 93. These statements by Paisios, recorded in Moscow, are entirely in accord with the ideas expressed by Khmelnytsky in his first letter to the tsar, in which he wrote that he would wish to be the subject of a sovereign such as Aleksei Mikhailovich and requested military Paisios informed the tsar of this diplomatic commission from the hetman, but received no reply, and reminded the courtiers before his departure that ‘the sovereign’s ukase in the matter had not been issued’. The tsar’s decision was communicated to him three days later (9 May 1649): it com­prised the basic principles and rationale of Muscovite policy toward the Khmelnytsky Uprising, which remained almost entirely consistent until the summer of 1653.

What was the tenor of Muscovite policy toward the uprising as pre­sented in the official reply? The patriarch was told that the tsar could not send an army to reinforce Khmelnytsky or take the Zaporozhian Host and its territory under his protection, because Muscovy had concluded an ‘eternal peace’ with the Commonwealth. At the same time, it was in­dicated that if Khmelnytsky and the Cossacks should themselves succeed in throwing off the king’s authority and express their desire to submit to the tsar, he could take them under his ‘high hand’, as that would not be a violation of the ‘eternal peace’. Furthermore, the patriarch was assured that the tsar was prepared to admit the Cossacks into Muscovy if there ‘should be oppression and persecution of the Cherkasians on the part of the Poles because of the Orthodox Christian faith and if they should go to the land of His Tsarist Majesty’. This was the sole reference to religion in the reply given to the patriarch. Thus it appeared that the tsar, as a Christian ruler, could not violate his oath to another Christian monarch, but, being an Orthodox Christian, was prepared to welcome the Cos­sacks on his territory if it came to a defense of the Orthodox faith. Paisios, seemingly agreeing with the tsar’s position on the treaty with the Com­monwealth, noted that he was unaware of its existence and ‘knew himself that for him, the great Christian sovereign, His Tsarist Majesty, it was in fact impossible to violate that eternal peace, but necessary to observe it, while the Zaporozhian Cossacks, being simple people, spoke without knowing anything’.¹⁰⁵ The position taken by the Muscovite government in its reply to Paisios was fully developed in the tsar’s letters and in the documentation of Muscovite embassies to Ukraine.¹⁰⁶

As for Cossack diplomacy, very early on it had developed a clearly de­fined strategy in its contacts with Muscovy. Stressing the idea of religious assistance from him. In his letter of February 1649 to the tsar, Khmelnytsky stressed the religious theme, as he had done earlier, writing that the Poles ‘have slaughtered several Christian towns; capturing priests and monks, they butcher them and subject them to various tortures, like Herod’. He also developed the theme of ‘prophecy’, mentioned in his first letter to the tsar: ‘that the Western adherents of different faiths may submit beneath the foot of your tsarist Orthodoxy and all Orthodoxy’. In practice, Khmelnytsky was seeking Muscovy’s intervention in the war against the Commonwealth on the Smolensk front (DBKh, p. 94).

¹⁰⁵ See VUR, 2: 100-ι.

¹⁰⁶ See, e.g., the tsar’s letter of 13 June 1649 to Khmelnytsky in VUR, 2: 208-9; instructions of September 1649 to the envoy Grigorii Neronov (ibid., p. 258), etc. unity, the Cossacks continually sought to involve the tsarist forces in the theater of military operations.^[671] In advancing arguments in favor of its position, however, Cossackdom had to keep the dialogue within the par­ameters established by Moscow’s official position. In 1649, for example, when the tsarist envoy Grigorii Unkovsky asserted during negotiations with Khmelnytsky that the tsar was prepared to take the Zaporozhian Host under his authority if it should free itself from the Poles, the hetman proposed his own solution to the legal difficulty of violating the ‘eternal peace’. He noted particularly that the Cossacks had only taken an oath of loyalty and ‘kissed the cross’ to Wladyslaw, while they had not elected, crowned, or sworn loyalty to the new king, Jan Kazimierz, hence ‘we have become free of him through the will of God’. The argument was more than artificial, as the Cossacks had not been admitted either to the elec­tion of Jan Kazimierz or to that of Wladyslaw IV, but the Muscovite envoy did not question the validity of the statement, as he had no ready reply to the hetman’s suggestion.^[672]

Khmelnytsky’s talks with the former secretary of Patriarch Filaret, the monk Arsenii Sukhanov, conducted in 1650, show that Cossack diplo­macy had yet another solution to the problem of the ‘eternal peace’ and ‘kissing the cross’, which Aleksei Mikhailovich was supposedly reluctant to brush aside. Khmelnytsky sought to convince Sukhanov that if the tsar would not violate the treaty, the Poles would do so themselves, as the pope ‘absolves them of all violations of oaths’, and if the tsar considered this a sin, all four Eastern patriarchs and their sobors would grant him ab­solution and pray for him. The hetman also sought to tempt Sukhanov with the idea of a universal Orthodox tsardom, noting that ‘all the faith­ful desire it—the Greeks and Serbs and Bulgarians and Moldavians and Wallachians—that we all be in communion’.^[673]

For the time being, given the military and political situation, Muscovy was unwilling to accept these arguments and refused the Cossack het­man’s requests, which, as Khmelnytsky admitted to Sukhanov in desper­ation, were ‘all shameful to me [Khmelnytsky] and of no use in any respect’.^[674] Nevertheless, when the tsarist government began to feel more sure of itself and the impending war with the Commonwealth took its place on the agenda of state policy, Moscow began to approach the prob­lem of legitimizing the war along the lines earlier suggested by Khmel­nytsky. In February 1651, when the first assembly of the land to examine the ‘Lithuanian affair’ convened, Patriarch Iosif of Moscow expressed his willingness, together with the entire ‘holy sobor’, to absolve the tsar of his oath pertaining to the conditions of the ‘eternal peace’. In a letter con­cerning the assembly, the patriarch noted particularly that

If the Polish king, despite his kissing of the cross and despite the eternal treaty of peace... does not take action and deal with the guilty according to the agreement and the eternal treaty, the holy great universal apostolic church may grant abso­lution to you, pious and virtuous Grand Sovereign, Tsar and Grand Prince of all Rus’, Aleksei Mikhailovich, in view of the king’s great misdeeds and his violation of the kissing of the cross and the eternal treaty.^[675]

The preparations that Muscovy undertook in the winter and spring of 1651 for intervention in the Ukrainian-Polish conflict fully introduced the religious motif into the context of Muscovite-Commonwealth rela­tions and negotiations. As religious claims receded into the background in Cossack justifications for the resumption of hostilities, the selfsame re­ligious elements came to the fore in Muscovite-Commonwealth rela­tions. Like the Cossack arguments pertaining to religion, those advanced by Muscovy concentrated on the question of church union. In Muscovite diplomatic documents it came to be treated as the principal (and, in prac­tice, the sole) instance of the violation of the rights of the ‘Greek religion’ by the royal administration, and thus of contractual relations between the Cossacks and the king.

The question of the royal administration’s violation of Cossackdom’s religious rights first became significant in Muscovite-Commonwealth negotiations in the spring of 1651.^[676] In April 1651, when a Polish- Lithuanian delegation headed by the castellan of Sandomierz, Stanislaw Witowski, was in Moscow, Muscovite diplomats offered the services of the tsar as mediator to the Poles in their conflict with the Cossacks. The tsar’s representatives at the negotiations stressed that the Cossacks had risen against the king because of religious persecution, ‘that they [the Poles] had deprived them [the Cossacks] of the faith of the Greek rite and forced them to accept their Roman faith, sealed godly churches, and im­posed the Union on Orthodox churches, and oppressed them in every way’.^[677] They also asserted that Wladyslaw IV ought not to persecute the Cossacks for their faith, as he had taken an oath to the Orthodox not to do so, and that there was no place for persecution on religious grounds in a Christian state.^[678]

The Commonwealth envoys sought to deny any persecution on reli­gious grounds, indicating the rights guaranteed to the Orthodox by the Diet constitution of 1635. According to the Muscovite record of the ne­gotiations, the Polish-Lithuanian representatives asserted that after Zboriv

Khmelnytsky, having become partial to loot gained by robbery and placing his confidence in the same rebels, the Zaporozhian Cherkasians, began to consider various means of freeing himself from subjection to His Royal Majesty, and began to raise a rebellion, while spreading the claim and offering the reason that they, the Cherkasians, had supposedly begun to stand up for the faith.^[679]

Despite its clearly polemical character, the Commonwealth envoys’ as­sessment of the balance between religious and military/political factors in Khmelnytsky’s policy was not far off the mark, but, having taken up the religious theme, Muscovite diplomacy was not easily deflected from it.

The religious question was raised again in July 1653 during negoti­ations conducted in Lviv by an embassy led by Boris Repnin-Obolensky, Bogdan Khitrovo, and Almaz Ivanov.^[680] As a breach of relations and com­mencement of hostilities were imminent, the Muscovite side proposed conditions that were then unacceptable to the Commonwealth: not only making peace with Khmelnytsky according to the terms of the Treaty of Zboriv but also recognizing the Muscovite tsar as de facto mediator and arbiter of Cossack-Commonwealth relations. The main instrument of Muscovite pressure on the Commonwealth became the religious ques­tion. The Muscovite envoys maintained that the king had not kept the promises made at Zboriv and was continuing to persecute the Orthodox. Besides advancing tried and true arguments, both sides put forward new ones in the course of the discussions.^[681]

The Commonwealth representatives stressed that churches were not being taken away from the Orthodox by force, ‘and whatever holy churches have gone over to the Union, those churches, too, have not been converted to the Union by force, but the priests of those holy churches themselves have voluntarily adhered to the Union and converted those holy churches to the Union’.^[682] The Muscovite delegation, however, con­tinued to maintain that the churches had been forcibly converted to the Union and that the king was continuing to persecute the Orthodox. Some of the evidence put forward in support of this claim was gathered by the envoys in the course of their mission. As an example of the persecution of the Orthodox, they cited an incident in Minsk involving noblemen who had shot arrows at St Peter’s Monastery: the envoys had seen for them­selves the arrows that lodged in the wall of the church.

It was also imputed to the king that the churches returned to the Orthodox after Zboriv had been taken away from them once again after Berestechko. The situation involving the Orthodox church and monastery in Lublin was cited as an example.^[683] After Zboriv they had been returned to the Orthodox, but after Berestechko they were restored to the Uniates (the hegumen and the monks ‘were driven out of the monastery with great indignity’). The conclusion drawn by the Mus­covite delegation was that Khmelnytsky had renewed hostilities because of the king’s violation of the Treaty of Zboriv, ‘and, moreover, because of the great persecution of the faith and the destruction of the Eastern churches’.^[684]

The Commonwealth representatives at the negotiations asserted once again that no one was persecuting the Orthodox or closing their churches (it was noted that there was not a single Uniate church in Lviv, where the negotiations were taking place). According to them, not only had the king made no promise at Zboriv to abolish the Union but he could not do so even if he wished, as this was a matter for the pope and the Kyivan met­ropolitan to resolve; moreover, the king had sworn to uphold the liberties of his nobiliary subjects, including the Uniates; and, finally, he had no right to prohibit the Union on private estates. The Polish-Lithuanian side also went over to the attack on the religious issue, maintaining that the tsar had no right to intervene in the internal affairs of the Common­wealth, and that despite the presence of Catholics in Muscovy, there was not a single Catholic church for them. Moreover, the Commonwealth envoys claimed that the patriarch of Moscow was violating the ‘eternal peace’ by appointing Orthodox priests in the border regions of the Commonwealth.^[685] The envoys also asserted that Khmelnytsky had begun the war ‘for his own benefit’, using religion as a cover: this was evident not only from the rebels’ looting of Orthodox churches and from Khmelnytsky’s conflict with Orthodox Moldavia but also from his vas­salage to the Turkish sultan and his acceptance of the ‘infidel’ faith.^[686] The Muscovite representatives, for their part, played the Muslim card to encourage the Commonwealth toward an accommodation with the Cos­sacks, who would otherwise—so the Muscovites claimed—become sub­jects of the ‘infidels’. The Muscovite representatives were instructed to state that ‘there is no such violent persecution of the faith by the infidels as they, the Cherkasians, suffer from the Poles’.^[687]

The alliance of the Cossacks with the ‘infidels’—the Turks and Tatars—was indeed an important factor that often surfaced in Cos­sack-Muscovite negotiations between 1648 and 1653. Its importance was heightened by perfectly genuine Muscovite fears that the principal victim of such an alliance would be Muscovy itself. Moreover, Cossack negoti­ations with Moscow were based on the principle of the religious unity and solidarity of Orthodox polities, endowing the subject of an alliance with the ‘infidels’ with particular significance and piquancy. Khmelnytsky often found himself obliged to make excuses for his alliance with the Tatars. His position on the matter was simple and clear-cut: inasmuch as the Tatars were lending assistance in the struggle with Catholic Com­monwealth, which was persecuting the Orthodox Ruthenians, the al­liance was due to divine providence and enjoyed God’s blessing. That is how Khmelnytsky presented his alliance with the Crimea to Patriarch Paisios of Jerusalem^[688] and explained the religious factor in the uprising in conversation with the Muscovite envoy Grigorii Neronov. Neronov re­ported him as saying that ‘Indeed, they, the Orthodox Christians, had been given the Crimean khan with his whole Horde by God to assist them in liberating themselves from the accursed Poles.’¹²⁵ In a letter to the Don Cossacks, Khmelnytsky also explained his alliance with the Crimea by citing his concern for the Orthodox Church: ‘And in all things we need the favor of His Royal Highness the Crimean Khan and all his Hordes, thanks to which we have regained not a few godly churches, for which we should all give our lives.’¹²⁶

Seeking to encourage the Muscovite government to enter the war with the Commonwealth, Khmelnytsky made several attempts to play the Crimean and Turkish card. At one point, he even ventured to tempt the Muscovite tsar with the prospect of uniting not only Orthodox lands and peoples under his rule, but Islamic and even Protestant ones as well: ‘And the time is now approaching’, he told Grigorii Neronov in 1649, ‘when all the infidel states and those of various other faiths will soon be of the Orthodox Christian faith under the great Eastern sovereign’.¹²⁷ On other occasions, Khmelnytsky threatened joint action with the Crimea against Muscovy. In response to such threats, Muscovite envoys constantly reit­erated to the hetman that, ‘having regard for God and the common Orthodox Christian faith... [he should] discourage the infidels from all harm and make no common cause with them against the Orthodox Christian faith and the Muscovite state’.¹²⁸ Thus did tsarist diplomacy at­tempt to play on feelings of Orthodox solidarity, which had earlier been exploited with considerable success by Khmelnytsky.

Another of Khmelnytsky’s tactics came down to calling on Moscow to his return from Ukraine, ‘the metropolitan is surprised that the hetman, an Orthodox Christian, nevertheless maintains fraternal relations and an alliance with the infidel Crimean khan’. Ac­cording to this report, the metropolitan advised Khmelnytsky not to trust the khan, since the Muslims did not consider it a sin to break an oath sworn to Christians, but, on the contrary, regarded friendship with them as a sin (ibid., 3: 122).

¹²⁵ See VUR, 2: 267.

¹²⁶ See DBKh, p. 163. Characteristically, it was this interpretation of the Cossack alliance with the Tatars that was reflected in the tsar’s message to participants in the Assembly of the Land of 1653, which decided to declare war on the Commonwealth. In particular, it contained the following statement about the Cossacks: ‘And they do not wish to lose the holy Christian faith and to see the holy churches of God destroyed, and, seeing that they were subject to such severe persecution, having involuntarily summoned the Crimean khan with his Horde to assist them, they began to stand up for the Orthodox Christian faith and the holy churches of God’ (Zaborovskii, ed., Katoliki,pravoslavnye, uniaty, p. 152).

¹²⁷ See VUR, 2: 273.

¹²⁸ See Khmelnytsky’s threats and Neronov’s replies to them in VUR, 2: 268-70. Cf. the record of Arsenii Sukhanov’s negotiations with Khmelnytsky (ibid., p. 188) and the instructions of August 1650 to the Muscovite envoy Vasilii Unkovsky (ibid., pp. 394-5). In the latter docu­ment, Unkovsky was advised to indicate to the Cossacks that as ‘Orthodox Christians it was un­seemly and sinful before God for them to ally themselves with infidels’. The envoy’s statement on the matter is recorded in his report (ibid., p. 431). Cf. also VUR, 3: 148.

assist the Cossacks lest they become vassals of Istanbul and take the side of Muscovy’s enemies. Visiting Moscow in the spring of 1653, Khmelnyt­sky’s envoy Ivan Iskra pointedly emphasized the Cossacks’ unwillingness to become subjects of the Tatars.^[689] The next Cossack embassy, headed by Kindrat Burliai and Syluian Muzhylovsky, stated that even though the Turks and Tatars were asking the Cossacks to accept their overlordship, they did not want to bypass ‘the great Christian Sovereign, Tsar and Grand Prince Aleksei Mikhailovich, Autocrat of all Rus’, in order to be­come vassals of the infidels’.^[690] Khmelnytsky also threatened the tsar through occasional envoys. Aleksei Mikhailovich himself mentioned these threats in a letter to Khmelnytsky written in June 1653 that con­tained the first mention of Muscovy’s intervention in the war with the Commonwealth. In explaining this decision, the tsar responded to the Cossack hetman’s threats as follows: ‘We have deigned to take you under the high hand of Our Tsarist Majesty so that you may not be a proverb and a byword to the enemies of the cross of Christ.’¹³¹

An official letter of May 1653 to participants in the Assembly of the Land noted that ‘the Turkish sultan and the Crimean khan had sent many embassies [to the Cossacks], asking them to become their subjects and make war as allies against the Muscovite state’, but the Cossacks had de­clined subjection to infidels. Nevertheless, the participants were warned that if the tsar did not accept the Cossacks as subjects,

they, unable to bear persecution by the Poles, will become subjects of the Turkish sultan or the Crimean khan, and then among them, the Cherkasians, the Orthodox Christian faith will be completely rooted out and the holy churches of God will lie in ruins, and all kinds of harm to the Muscovite state may be expected from them.¹³²

Thus the religious and military/political arguments were presented in tandem, reinforcing each other in the official attempt to incline the assembly toward accepting Cossack Ukraine as a dominion of the tsar and initiating a new war with the Commonwealth.

In the eyes of participants in the Assembly of the Land, the Ukrainian question consisted of two parts. The first was the problem of breaking the ‘eternal peace’ concluded with the Commonwealth in 1634; the second was that of accepting the Zaporozhian Cossacks as subjects of Muscovy. That is how the question was formulated in the tsar’s proclamation of 19 February 1651 convoking the Assembly of the Land, and it was considered in those terms during the assembly sessions in 1653.¹³³ The assembly’s resolutions on these questions were: first, to defend the honor of the deceased Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich and the ruling Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich by going to war with the ‘Lithuanian king’; and secondly to take the hetman under the tsar’s high hand ‘for the sake of the Orthodox Christian faith and the holy churches of God’.^[691]

As its reason for breaking the ‘eternal peace’, the Muscovite side cited the errors in the tsar’s titulature that Commonwealth officials had permitted themselves in writing to Moscow (the tsar’s proclamation convoking the Assembly of the Land listed 186 such instances, including the misnaming of Mikhail Fedorovich as Mikhail Filaretovich—Filaret was the monastic name of the tsar’s father, Fedor Romanov); the publication in the Com­monwealth of books that titled Wladyslaw IV Grand Prince of Moscow and the king’s refusal to punish the guilty (with execution); the granting of per­mission to a Crimean envoy to travel to Sweden across Commonwealth territory, which was forbidden by the peace treaty; and conflicts in border regions. Characteristically enough, the principal legal argument advanced by the Muscovite side—the errors in the tsar’s titulature and the demand to punish the guilty—evoked laughter from the Commonwealth officials during the sojourn of the Muscovite mission led by Boris Repnin-Obolensky (a fact noted with reproof in the assembly proceedings), but was taken with great seriousness in Moscow. This was the argument on which the assembly’s decision was based—to defend the honor of the sovereigns.^[692]

The problem of taking the Zaporozhian Host ‘under the tsar’s high hand’ was decided by the assembly on two levels. In the first place, the as­sembly had to deal with the issue of how the tsar could assume sover­eignty over the subjects of another monarch. This contradiction was resolved by noting that on ascending the throne, Jan Kazimierz had sworn not to infringe the religious rights of his subjects: since he had violated his oath in the case of the Cossacks, they were free to abandon him and be­come subjects of the Muscovite tsar.^[693] Reference was made to the text of Jan Kazimierz’s oath, which included excerpts from the act of the Warsaw Confederation of 1573.^[694] Thus, in the proceedings of the assembly, the Polish king figured as a violator of the religious rights of his subjects, while the Muscovite tsar was depicted as a protector of Orthodoxy and Ortho­dox churches in general, even outside the boundaries of Muscovy. The assembly’s most important decision in this context, ‘to take Hetman Bo- hdan Khmelnytsky and the whole Zaporozhian Host, with its towns and territories’, also pertained to the religious sphere. This was done ‘for the Orthodox Christian faith and the holy churches of God’.¹³⁸

The Orthodox Protectorate: Declarations and Misunderstandings

Arguments of a religious nature were important in justifying the Cos­sack-Muscovite alliance before and during the Council of Pereiaslav (January 1654), at which the Cossack side ratified the establishment of a Muscovite protectorate over the Zaporozhian Host. As the tsarist em­bassy headed by the boyar Vasilii Buturlin made its way across Ukrainian territory to Pereiaslav, it virtually became a triumphal procession of Orthodoxy. At almost every settlement of any significance, the envoys went to church and took part in ceremonial services. The unity of Muscovite and Kyivan Orthodoxy had been demonstrated by Muscovite envoys in Ukraine even before 1654, when they freely visited Cossack churches to pray; now it was officially confirmed by a group of Muscovite clergymen included in Buturlin’s embassy in order to accept the oath of loyalty from the local population. Led by Archimandrite Prokhor, the Muscovite priests took part in joint religious processions with Ukrainian clergymen, as on 6 January 1654, on the Feast of the Epiphany, when they carried an icon of the Savior donated by the tsar. They also readily took part in joint services with Archpriest Hryhorii of Pereiaslav and the local clergy.¹³⁹

a translation of the Diet constitution containing Jan Kazimierz’s oath and instructions to show it to Khmelnytsky. A copy of Jan Kazimierz’s oath was sent to Khmelnytsky by the Muscovite government, apparently at the suggestion of Feodosii Sofonovych, who was in Moscow at the time. As noted in the documents concerning Buturlin’s mission, ‘The Kyivan monk Feodosii was shown the oath in the Polish constitution sworn by King Jan Kazimierz at his coronation. And the monk Feodosii, having looked at the constitution and read that entire article, said that after it had been copied, it should be sent to the hetman with whomever the king should desig­nate’ (Akty IuZR, vol. 10 [1878]: 152-3). The Cossacks themselves, however, are unlikely to have considered this a wholly sufficient argument. In any event, they are not known to have used it in negotiations with either the Commonwealth or the Muscovite side.

¹³⁸ VUR, 3: 414.

¹³⁹ See the report of Buturlin’s embassy in VUR, 3: 423-89, here pp. 451, 452, 454, 458-9 ff. As David A. Frick puts it in his study of Ivan Vyhovsky, ‘The constant refrain of communica­tions between Rus’ and Muscovy before the treaty of Perejaslav... seems to have functioned as a kind of mutual cheerleading’ for the Orthodox churches. See his ‘The Circulation of Informa­tion about Ivan Vyhovs’kyj’, HUS 17, nos. 3-4 (December 1993): 271.

On meeting the embassy, Cossack officers and Ukrainian Orthodox clerics also stressed the religious elements of the new union. Colonel Pavlo Teteria of Pereiaslav, greeting Buturlin’s embassy, spoke of the ‘Orthodox and illustrious’ Zaporozhian Host coming under the ‘high hand of the great sovereign pious tsar of the East’.^[695] At the Council of Pereiaslav itself, Bohdan Khmelnytsky employed religious terminology to describe the choice that he and the Cossack officers had made in ac­cepting the tsar as protector of the Zaporozhian Host. According to re­ports prepared by Muscovite envoys present at the council, the hetman began by explaining the uprising as a reaction to the Polish persecution of the ‘Church of God’ and went on to counterpose the Turkish sultan and the Crimean khan, whom he called infidels, along with the Polish king (Khmelnytsky did not emphasize that the king was Catholic, but re­minded his audience of the ‘pitiless shedding of Christian blood’), to the Muscovite tsar, who was ‘of the same worship of the Greek rite, of the same faith’ as the Cossacks. According to the same source, the reaction of the Cossacks and burghers taking part in the council was also inspired by the religious factor: ‘we would rather die in our true faith under the firm hand of the Eastern Orthodox tsar than fall into the hands of the pagan who hates Christ’.^[696] Thus the path of the Cossack and Muscovite elites to Pereiaslav was the well-trodden one of religious and political alliances and alignments common during the Thirty Years’ War (1618—48), in which the role of the religious factor would be difficult, if not impossible, to exaggerate.

One of the important elements in the interpretation of the Pereiaslav Agreement by the Ukrainian side was the perception of relations between the tsar and the Zaporozhian Host in terms of the Orthodox tsar’s pro­tection of the Orthodox faithful. At the level of imagery, this view of the agreement was embodied in the allegory, of which the Ukrainians made considerable use, wherein an eagle spread its wings to protect its eaglets, that is, the Cossacks and all of ‘Little Rus’’. The theme of the eagle, the eagle’s wings, and patronage (protection) of the Host/Little Rus’ was ex­traordinarily popular in educated Kyivan circles at the time of the Pereiaslav Agreement. It was treated and developed in the tradition of Ukrainian emblematic poetry, with copious use of biblical symbolism.

According to the diplomatic report, the image of the eagle was em­ployed in the speeches of welcome made by Khmelnytsky and Vyhovsky to Buturlin at Pereiaslav: ‘As the eagle covers its nest, so did he, the sov­ereign, deign to take us under the high hand of His Tsarist Majesty.’^[697] After the Pereiaslav council, on the occasion of Buturlin’s entry into Kyiv, Metropolitan Kosov also greeted him with an allegory on this theme: ‘may the descent of the pious princes of Rus’ be renewed by your arrival, like the eagle’s young’.^[698] The same motif appeared in the speech of Archpriest Hryhorii: ‘Enter this divinely protected city with gladness... for thanks to your good offices our Orthodoxy of Little Rus’ will find rest beneath the peaceful protective wings of His Most Serene Tsarist Majesty.’^[699] In all these cases, the point of departure was the image of the two-headed eagle with its wings outstretched—the emblem of the Muscovite tsar.

Besides Archpriest Hryhorii, Khmelnytsky and Vyhovsky also made mention of Little Rus’ in speaking with Buturlin, and the hetman would make reference to the Orthodoxy of Great Rus’ in his speech at the Coun­cil of Pereiaslav.^[700] In a letter to the tsar signed on 8 January 1654, the very day of the council, the Cossack hetman referred to Aleksei Mikhailovich not as autocrat of all Rus’, but of ‘all Great and Little Rus’’.^[701] This at­tempt to add a new component to the tsar’s title, thereby altering its shorter, fundamental section, was an important step toward a new Ruthenian self-identification in ethnic, religious, and cultural terms—a process that began, as shown earlier, long before Pereiaslav.

Another important motif that also originated long before Pereiaslav and was fully expressed during Buturlin’s embassy to Ukraine was the representation of Kyiv as a former tsarist/princely capital. This motif made its appearance in Metropolitan Sylvestr Kosov’s address to Bu­turlin. Kosov noted particularly that Kyiv was the ‘very first seat of Rus’ [ruskii] piety’, and Volodymyr ‘the first pious Rus’ [rosiiskii] grand prince’.^[702] According to Buturlin’s diplomatic report, both Khmelnytsky and Vyhovsky referred to Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich as a ‘relative’ of Grand Prince Volodymyr.^[703] Kyivan burghers wrote to the tsar in May 1654 about the bequests made to Kyiv, ‘as their Rus' capital city’, by the ancient princes of Kyiv.^[704] And in his speech before the tsar in the autumn of that year, Archpriest Maksym Fylymonovych, touching on the decline of Kyiv, spoke of its earlier burgeoning: ‘during the rule of the Rus’ grand princes, the most eminent city of Kyiv was the natural mother of cities, the mother of churches, the abode of God, and was called the second Jerusalem’.^[705] Thus, on the level of images and symbols, the Ukrainian side emphasized the historical relationship between Kyivan and Mus­covite rulers, stressing the ‘primogeniture’ of Kyiv and its princes.

Such was the Ukrainian view of the Pereiaslav Agreement, expressed through the medium of solemn rhetoric. The Muscovite view of relations with the Cossacks underwent a number of changes and modifications in the period of several months between sessions of the Assembly of the Land in September and October 1653 and the Pereiaslav Council of Janu­ary 1654.^[706] The decisions and arguments of the Assembly of the Land concerning Ukraine formed the basis of the instructions given to Bu­turlin’s embassy, which was dispatched to Khmelnytsky following the as­sembly. Passages cited verbatim from the assembly’s resolutions are to be encountered in the official instructions to the embassy, in Buturlin’s speeches at Pereiaslav, and in the embassy’s report. At the same time, the report contains numerous arguments of a political, legal, historical, and religious character that do not pertain to the proceedings of the assembly. Some of the differences between those proceedings and Buturlin’s report may be explained by the diversity of the tasks that faced the assembly and the embassy, but others point to the emergence of important new elements in the Muscovite approach to the question of taking the Zaporozhian Host under the ‘tsar’s high hand’ following the dissolution of the assembly.

According to his report, Buturlin delivered two major speeches in Pereiaslav. The first was given immediately after the Cossack council and included an account of the arguments formulated by the Assembly of the Land in favor of taking the Zaporozhian Host under the tsar’s sover- eignty.^[707] The second took place after Khmelnytsky and the officers had sworn loyalty to the tsar, when Buturlin presented the tsar’s banner, a mace, and a robe to the hetman. The latter speech was notable for adding new historical and legal elements to the arguments in favor of a Mus­covite-Cossack agreement. In that speech, Buturlin employed a number of motifs that paralleled not only the principal historical and legal aspects but also the sequence of textual imagery appearing in the speeches of Ukrainian political and religious leaders of the period.¹⁵³ One of them was the image of an eagle covering its eaglets with its wings in order to protect them, which Buturlin invoked with reference to the Muscovite tsar. The tsar, he noted, bore ‘the emblem of the eagle; as an eagle covers its nest and watches over its young, so the tsar wish[es] to cover with his sovereign favor the city of Kyiv and other towns that were once the nest of his tsarist eagle, and with it [Kyiv] to take his faithful eaglets, which were once ruled by the pious tsars, under his protection’.¹⁵⁴

The idea of the tsar’s patronage and protection, with which we are fa­miliar, was in fact the leitmotif of the speech. In presenting the hetman with the robe, Buturlin noted the symbolism associated with this compon­ent of the tsar’s gift: ‘As a token of his tsarist favor, he presents you with this piece of clothing, indicating, as always by his constant sovereign favor, that he wishes to cover you and all the Orthodox who submit to his most eminent tsarist rule.’¹⁵⁵ There is a similar motif in the portion of the speech concerning the gift of a cap to the hetman: ‘His Most Serene Tsarist Majesty gives this cap for protection.’¹⁵⁶ The theme of protection and patronage is developed especially in those portions of the speech that mention the Theotokos. Noting that the tsar’s banner depicted ‘the most

¹⁵³ The interpretation of the report submitted by Buturlin’s embassy, as well as of other Mus­covite diplomatic documents of this period, is rendered difficult by the problem of determining the accuracy of the statements and speeches of embassy members and those of their interlocu­tors, persons questioned et al., which were incorporated into the embassy’s reports. There is evi­dence to suggest that on occasion Muscovite diplomats embellished the record of their statements or speeches with passages that they had not actually spoken, but considered politic to include with a view to the tsar’s favor or disfavor (cf. Hrushevs’kyi, Istoriia Ukratny-Rusy, vol. 9, pt. 2, pp. 751-2).

Such reservations should be borne in mind when interpreting Buturlin’s report, even though Ivan Krypiakevych, who studied the document, considered that the speeches incorporated into the text were distinguished by ‘characteristic peculiarities of style’ and assumed that the writer of the report made use of ‘notes of the speakers themselves or their secretaries’ (Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi, 1st edn., p. 459). The prevailing opinion today is that the description of the Pereiaslav council in Buturlin’s report was either written by Ivan Vyhovsky in person or, at the very least, issued from his chancery (see L. V. Zaborovskii, ‘Pereiaslavskaia rada i moskovskie soglasheniia 1654 goda: problemy issledovaniia’ in Rossiia-Ukraina: istoriia Vzaimootnoshenii, ed. A. I. Miller et al. [Moscow, 1997], pp. 39-49, here 43; id., Katoliki, pravoslavnye, uniaty, pp.312-13).

If one assumes that the authors or co-authors of Buturlin’s second speech were in fact Ukrainians, then it is worth asking where the text was composed—in Moscow or in Ukraine. The report’s reference to Buturlin’s receiving from Moscow the text of the speech to be de­livered when presenting the tsar’s insignia goes some way toward resolving the problem. A further indication that the Moscow chancery was already familiar with the new ‘language’ of communication with the Ukrainians is the tsar’s speech praising the envoys upon their return to Moscow, which made reference to Saints Antonii and Feodosii (see Hrushevs’kyi, Istoriia Ukratny-Rusy, vol. 9, pt. 2, p. 750).

In my view, it is precisely the stylistic consistency of the Ukrainian speeches and their vari­ation from the basic text of the report, as well as the stylistic variety even of the speeches of Buturlin himself, that attest to the general accuracy of this report and make it a useful source for studying the diplomatic discourse of the time.

¹⁵⁴ VUR, 3: 468. ¹⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 468. ¹⁵⁶ Ibid. blessed Theotokos for protection’, Buturlin referred directly to the le­gend of Blachernai, which is associated with the development of the cult of the Holy Protection in Rus’.^[708]

The author or authors of Buturlin’s second speech clearly accepted many aspects of the Ukrainian side’s cultural code as their own and at­tempted to speak to the representatives of the Cossack and church elites in terms familiar to them. The substance of the embassy report shows clearly that both of Buturlin’s speeches were not delivered extempore, but were read from a prepared text. While the text of the first speech was ap­parently contained in the general instructions to the embassy (as attested by its stylistic and phraseological resemblance to the proceedings of the Assembly of the Land), the text of the second speech was received by the embassy considerably later, when it was already on Ukrainian territory.

The Assembly of the Land decided to declare war on the Common­wealth and accept the ‘hetman with the entire Zaporozhian Host’ as sub­jects on i October, and by 9 October the plenipotentiary embassy headed by Buturlin was already on its way to Khmelnytsky. It was dispatched in haste, and ‘the text according to which the hetman and the Zaporozhian Host should take the oath, and which was to be sent to the towns, and the banner, and the mace, and the robe, and the cap’ were sent after the em­bassy from Moscow. On 17 December, the envoys received notification from Moscow that the banner that was being sent to them, along with a letter with the text of the speech that Buturlin was to deliver when pre­senting the banner and other insignia of rule, had been damaged en route, and the tsar ordered that a new banner be prepared.¹⁵⁸ A courier from the tsar, carrying a new banner and, most probably, a new letter with the text of the speech, caught up with the embassy on Ukrainian territory on 1 January 1654.¹⁵⁹ Thus, Buturlin presented the new banner to Khmel­nytsky in Pereiaslav on 8 January and ‘delivered a speech to the hetman according to the instructions of the government’.¹⁶⁰

This was the speech that differed so clearly in style and in the substance of its historical and legal argumentation from Buturlin’s first speech and the embassy’s other materials, and showed considerable affinity with the speeches of the Ukrainian figures. The attention paid by Buturlin to the saints most honored in Kyiv—Antonii and Feodosii and the great martyr Barbara—seems somewhat unnatural from a Muscovite boyar who at­tributed the success of his mission in the same report to the intercession of ‘the great miracle workers Petr, and Aleksei, and Iona, and Philip of Moscow and of all Rus’’. Saints Antonii, Feodosii, and Barbara were far beyond the pale of current Muscovite ‘fashion’ and clearly belonged to

¹⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 442.

¹⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 454.

¹⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 467.

Kyiv.^[709] Buturlin’s reference to them, as well as the words of his speech that noted Kyiv’s primacy in the diffusion of Orthodoxy in Rus’, were not only calculated to appeal to the Ukrainians but, judging by the style of the speech, were also suggested by a representative of the Kyivan clergy.^[710]

In spite of the religious unity proclaimed at the Council of Pereiaslav and Muscovite attempts to adopt the vocabulary of their Ukrainian coun­terparts, the course of the negotiations revealed serious differences be­tween the two sides that manifested themselves in diverse interpretations of the nature of treaty relations between the Host and the tsarist adminis­tration. When the Orthodox clergymen from Moscow prepared to accept the oath of loyalty to the tsar from Khmelnytsky and his entourage at the Church of the Dormition in Pereiaslav, the hetman proposed, to the sur­prise of the Muscovite envoys, that they themselves first swear an oath in the name of the tsar to protect the Zaporozhian Host against the Com­monwealth, to refrain from violating liberties and estate privileges, and to confirm property rights. Buturlin replied that in Muscovy subjects alone took oaths to the tsar, not vice versa, and promised that the tsar would sat­isfy their requests. Khmelnytsky, claiming that he had to discuss the mat­ter with his colonels, thereupon exited the church, leaving the clergymen and Muscovite envoys at a loss. Somewhat later, two Cossack colonels, Pavlo Teteria and Hryhorii Lisnytsky (Sakhnovych), entered the church and began a discussion with Buturlin that sheds light on the two parties’ divergent interpretations of treaty relations between the Zaporozhian Host and the Muscovite tsar.

The colonels repeated Khmelnytsky’s earlier demand that the envoys take an oath in the name of the tsar, referring to established practice in re­lations between the Host and the Polish king, which required that oaths to uphold a treaty be sworn both by representatives of the Host and by the Commonwealth commissioners who represented the royal administra­tion. According to the diplomatic report, Buturlin rejected this compari­son, advancing the following arguments: Polish kings, unlike the Muscovite tsar, were ‘infidels’, meaning that they were not Orthodox; they were not ‘autocrats’ but were elected to the kingship instead of ac­ceding to it by inheritance; nor could they be trusted, since ‘what they swear to, even that they never uphold’. The Muscovite envoy also noted that his powers were limited, as he had been dispatched ‘with the sover­eign’s gracious word’ and could by no means swear an oath in the name of the tsar. Buturlin insisted that the Cossacks take the tsar at his word. Finally, Khmelnytsky returned to the church and took an oath of loyalty to the tsar together with his colonels, noting that they would appeal to the tsar in the matter (‘will proceed to make obeisance’) later.^[711]

The incident seemed closed, but two days later the Cossack officers at­tempted (once again, unsuccessfully) to obtain letters, in the names of the envoys at least, confirming their liberties and privileges. As they had during the negotiations at the Church of the Dormition, the officers began to claim that unless an oath were taken and letters issued, the Cos­sack rank and file would begin to ‘doubt’. It may be assumed that these references to the lower ranks were not just a negotiating ploy in the diffi­cult talks with the Muscovite delegation but also reflected the notion, firmly established among the broader Cossack masses, that relations be­tween the king/tsar and the Zaporozhian Host had their basis in mutually recognized treaties. Subsequently there were rumors, evidently spread by the officers, to the effect that the Muscovite envoys had sworn after all to uphold the rights and privileges of Ukrainian society. The circulation of these rumors naturally assisted the officers in their efforts to present the decisions of the Pereiaslav council in a positive light at the regimental and company levels.^[712]

As we have seen, the putative unity of the two negotiating parties, based on their common religious tradition, was undermined by their different interpretations of the nature of that unity. As David Frick has justly noted, ‘the history of the Treaty of Pereiaslav can be interpreted as a long series of cross-cultural misunderstandings’.^[713] It would appear that Moscow, while accepting the new parameters and vocabulary of the dis­course initiated by the Ukrainians, reserved the right to infuse that dis­course with its own content, reflecting the Muscovite political and legal tradition. This is vividly illustrated by Moscow’s reaction to Khmelnyt­sky’s attempt to introduce the terms Little and Great Rus’ into the tsar’s official title. The reaction was rather swift: as early as February 1654, the tsar wrote the first letters in which he styled himself ‘Autocrat of Little and Great Rus’’.^[714] Even as he accepted a change of title that reflected the Ukrainian tradition of political thought more than the Muscovite, the tsar added another element to his title based entirely on the Muscovite polit­ical tradition. Besides calling himself ‘Sovereign of Great and Little Rus” instead of ‘Sovereign of all Rus”, he claimed the additional title ‘Prince of Kyiv and Chernihiv'.

In his letter of December 1653 to the tsar, Buturlin, writing about the Cossack land, also made reference to ‘Kyiv, Chernihiv, and all of Little Rus''.¹⁶⁷ In the same month the Ambassadorial Office sent a draft letter containing the titles of the Cossack hetman and his colonels to the boyars Kurakin and Volkonsky, who were appointed to Kyiv as voevodas. The most interesting element of the letter appears to be the titles of the boyars themselves, who were styled ‘boyars and voevodas of the patrimony of His Tsarist Majesty, the Grand Principality of Kyiv'.¹⁶⁸ In April 1654, Aleksei Mikhailovich wrote of Kyiv as his patrimony to none other than Bohdan Khmelnytsky.¹⁶⁹ Thus the historical link between the Muscovite tsars and St Volodymyr, which had been promoted by Ruthenian intel­lectuals long before the Pereiaslav Agreement, was now turning into a legal claim to the tsar's patrimony.

The idea of the ethnic unity of the two Rus' nations, which was important to the Little Russian ideology of the Kyivan clergy in the 1620s, seems not to have been accepted or even treated seriously in mid-century Moscow.¹⁷⁰ Nevertheless, the idea of the religious unity of united elements of the old and new epochs—the tsar's old title, the new title with the division into Great and Little Rus', and the Muscovite notion of the Ruthenian population of the Com­monwealth as ‘Belarusians' who spoke the ‘Belarusian' language (cf. copy of the letter in VUR, 3: 516).

¹⁶⁷ The same formula was employed in the tsar's letter of April 1654 to Colonel Ivan Bohun and in his proclamation to the residents of Mahilioh(see Zaborovskii, ed., Katoliki, pravoslavnye, uniaty, pp. 188, 218).

¹⁶⁸ VUR, 3: 506. ¹⁶⁹ Zaborovskii, ed., Katoliki,pravoslavnye, uniaty, p. 181.

¹⁷⁰ There is also no evidence that the Kyivan clergymen or the Cossack officers themselves made any further insistence on those notions of unity. At the same time, the idea of ethnic affin­ity and ties of blood between the two Rus' nations held by the Kyivan clergymen of the 1620s was echoed to some extent by the more broadly conceived theory of all-Slavic ethnolinguistic ties be­tween the Kingdom of Poland ‘with its grand principalities' and Muscovy presented by Adam Kysil in a speech to the tsar in August 1647. Having been sent to Moscow at the head of a Com­monwealth embassy in order to conclude an alliance against the Tatars, Kysil spoke as follows: ‘like two Lebanese cedars springing from a single root, so these two great states have been united and created by the right hand of God Almighty out of one Slavic blood and one language of the Slavic people'. See the text of Kysil's speech, published from a Russian copy, in Frank E. Sysyn, ‘A Speech before the Tsar: Adam Kysil's Oration on August 28, 1647 (N.S.)' in Miedzy Wscho- dem a Zachodem. RzeczpospolitaXVI-XVIII w., ed. Teresa Chynczewska-Hennel et al. (Warsaw, 1993), pp. 133-42, here 139-42.

The notion of ethnic kinship between Muscovy and Poland was advanced in contacts with the Muscovite side not only by Kysil but also by other Commonwealth diplomats (see, e.g., refer­ences to the religious, ethnic [‘one language'], and geographical proximity of Poland and Muscovy in the documents of Vasilii Streshnev's embassy to the Commonwealth (1646): RGADA, fond 79 (‘Relations with Poland'), no. 71, f. 218^v. Muscovite officials often joined their Polish-Lithuanian and Muscovite Rus’, on which Ruthenian Orthodox activists had insisted as far back as the late sixteenth century, proved an acceptable basis for legitimizing the Pereiaslav Agreement on the Muscovite side because of the abrupt shift of the Muscovite elites in the direction of Greek, and eventually Ruthenian, Orthodoxy in the late 1640s and early 1650s. On the other hand, the notion of establishing a universal Orthodox monarchy under the supreme rule of the tsar, which was put forward on a number of occasions by the Cossack side, appar­ently enjoyed little currency in Muscovite governmental circles. The si­lence on the matter in official Muscovite documents concerning Pereiaslav shows that in their plans, deeds, and even words, the Muscovite secular authorities tended less toward idealism than toward caution and realism.¹⁷¹

In the Pereiaslav Agreement, the tsarist government perceived and em­phasized the acceptance of the tsar’s sovereignty, confirmed by an oath, on the part of the hetman and the Zaporozhian Host, with a concomitant obligation to serve the tsar. The addition of a new element to the tsar’s title in 1655—White Rus’, meaning the Ruthenian territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania conquered by the tsar’s armies—introduced a gradation among the three Ruses according to the degree of tsarist con­trol over them. White Rus’ was conquered territory and thus had no rights, while the lands of Little Rus’, annexed under a negotiated arrange­ment, retained certain rights, hence local authority was exercised not by the tsar’s voevodas but by the Cossack administration.

Commonwealth counterparts in justifying the Commonwealth-Muscovite alliance against the Crimea in religious terms, representing it as a union of Christians against Muslims (ibid., ff. 203^v, 292), but it is not known what reaction, if any, was elicited in Moscow by Polish appeals for Slavic unity. When similar ideas were raised in Muscovy—also in relation to the anti­Ottoman struggle—by the Croatian Catholic priest Juraj Krizanic, they met with no response. On Krizanic, see L. N. Pushkarev, Iurii Krizhanich: ocherk zhizni i Ivorchestva (Moscow, 1984). See also the English translation of Krizanic’s Politika in Russian Statecraft: The ‘Politika’ of Iurii Krizhanich, ed. John M. Letiche and Basil Dmytryshyn (Oxford and New York, 1985).

¹⁷¹ For an analysis of the ‘Articles of Bohdan Khmelnytsky’ (March 1654), which, together with the tsar’s responses to them, constituted the text of the Ukrainian-Russian agreement, see Ch. 1.

The idea of a universal Orthodox empire headed by the Muscovite tsar, which appears in sev­eral of Khmelnytsky’s letters, echoed statements made by the Muscovite monk Arsenii Sukhanov in his talks with Greek theologians (see Kapterev, Kharakter otnoshenii Rossii k Pravoslavnomu Vostoku, pp. 390-2). On the Ukrainian side, the influence of this idea is also ap­parent in a speech made to a Muscovite embassy in the summer of 1653 by Archpriest Hryhorii of Pereiaslav. Expressing all kinds of desiderata addressed to the Muscovite tsar, he wished par­ticularly for ‘union of the faith in his time, and godspeed against the godless who are crushing the East[ern] churches and all Orthodox Christians. That he may be not only an autocrat, but ruler of the whole world, like a second Augustus.’ In January 1654, he expressed a similar wish to Buturlin’s embassy: ‘that the Lord our God may unite not only Little Rus’, but all the kingdoms of this world, and make them submit to the unconquerable hand of His Most Serene Tsarist Majesty’ (VUR, 3: 289, 455).

As far as the Cossacks were concerned, their official view of the agreement (with particular stress on Orthodox unity) was a product de­signed primarily for export, and only ‘situationally’ applied by the het­man’s administration. Khmelnytsky’s letters demonstrate that his chancery, headed by Vyhovsky, and the hetman himself switched easily from one set of legal arguments and biblical images to another, depend­ing on the addressee of a particular letter—the tsar, the king, the sultan, or some other European ruler.¹⁷² Given Khmelnytsky’s ‘situational’ ap­proach in directing Orthodox rhetoric toward Moscow, he was able to shift readily from the appeals launched at the beginning of the revolt for the tsar to establish a universal Orthodox monarchy to the harder line that he took at Pereiaslav, where he demanded an oath in the name of the tsar to uphold the rights and liberties of Cossackdom and Rus’ as a whole.

It would appear that the Cossacks were prepared to accept the complex of ideas associated with Little Rus’ in order to substantiate and obtain support for their military and political plans, but utterly rejected the no­tion that the Muscovite tsars had a dynastic claim to their land. In legal and political terms, the focus of all Cossack aspirations continued to be the ‘Zaporozhian Host’ and its liberties. In those terms, from the view­point of the Cossack officers, the agreement was meant to be an act of ‘voluntary subordination’, as evidenced by Khmelnytsky’s speech at the council, which was conceived as an argument in favor of the free choice of one monarch out of several. The Cossacks were prepared to swear to ob­serve the terms of the contract, but the tsar, for his part, was also expected to swear to uphold his obligations. This was a view of Pereiaslav as a pact between two parties bound by mutual obligations, and thus considered equal under the terms of a specific agreement.

The difference between Muscovite and Cossack attitudes to the unity of Great and Little Rus’ became fully apparent with the worsening of re­lations between Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky and the Muscovite authorities. In the summer of 1658, a secretary of the Host told the Muscovite repre­sentative Vasilii Kikin, in line with Vyhovsky’s new policy, that the het­man had earlier rendered faithful service to the tsar and ‘brought Little Rus’ under the high hand of His Tsarist Majesty as a subject, but [now] Great Rus’ will be Great Rus’, while Little Rus’ will be Little Rus’, since there is an invinc[ible] army in Little Rus’ as well’. Kikin responded an­grily, asking who had told the secretary to divide Great Rus’ from Little Rus’. On learning that it was the hetman himself, Kikin asserted that ‘Little Rus’, the branch that had been torn away, was united with its true root, Great Rus’, by God’.¹⁷³ The apparent logic behind Kikin’s

¹⁷² On Vyhovsky’s extraordinary dexterity in switching from one set of arguments to another, see Frick, ‘The Circulation of Information about Ivan Vyhovs’kyj’.

¹⁷³ See Akty IuZR, vol. 4 (1863): 145.

statement reversed all the claims of the Ruthenian clergy about the his­torical relations between Great and Little Rus’, which were premised on the notion of Kyiv’s primacy as the first ‘Rus’ capital’ and on the view of St Volodymyr as the first ‘Rus’ monarch’. Kikin, on the contrary, posited Little Rus’ as an outgrowth of Great Rus’—a hereditary tsarist possession once lost and now regained.

The Cossack administration’s official view of the Pereiaslav Agreement reflected not so much the prevailing notions of the Cossack elite about the legal norms of international relations as the traditional thinking of the Kyivan clergy. The latter found it entirely natural to search for protectors and attempt to stabilize the position of the church under the patronage of a specific temporal authority.^[715] Nevertheless, as Metropolitan Kosov’s conflicts with the tsar’s voevodas after the Pereiaslav Agreement made clear, there were also cardinal differences between the conceptions of the religious unity of Rus’ held by the Kyivan clergy and the Muscovite ad­ministration. For the Kyivan clergy, what counted was not only the pro­tection of the Orthodox tsar in their struggle against the Union, but first and foremost the preservation of all the rights and privileges of the met­ropolitanate. For the Muscovite side, above all for the patriarch of Moscow, the overriding issue was the subordination of the Kyivan met­ropolitanate to Moscow’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction. As early as January 1654, Metropolitan Kosov sent the monk Makarii Krynytsky on a west­ward journey: he entered a protest in the castle record-books of Lutsk against the efforts of Muscovite voevodas to oblige the Kyivan clergy to take an oath of loyalty to the tsar. Judging by Krynytsky’s words, there were already fears in Kyiv that the Muscovite authorities would arbitrar­ily replace the Kyivan metropolitan or restrict the metropolitanate’s jurisdiction.^[716] The Orthodox nobleman Pavlo Olekshych, a supporter of the Polish orientation who wrote to Colonel Ivan Bohun in March 1654, treated an oath to the tsar as a betrayal of the patriarch of Constantinople, effectively drawing a parallel between subordination to Moscow and the Union.^[717]

The differences between the Kyivan clergy and the Muscovite admin­istration became fully apparent in the course of negotiations between Muscovite courtiers and a delegation from the Kyivan metropolitanate headed by the hegumen of the St Nicholas Hermitage Monastery, Ino- kentii Gizel. The delegation, which reached Aleksei Mikhailovich’s head­quarters at Smolensk in July 1654, sought the tsar’s confirmation of property rights and privileges of the church and its clergy. Gizel’s princi­pal task was to obtain the tsar’s recognition that the Kyivan metro­politanate was under the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constantinople. Furthermore, the delegation was to secure the tsar’s recognition of the Kyivan metropolitan’s authority over the Orthodox eparchies of Volhynia and Lithuania. Gizel also wanted the tsar to refrain from sending Mus­covite clergymen to Ukraine or bringing Ukrainian clergymen to Mus­covy under duress. The text of the delegation’s ‘articles’ clarifies Kosov’s fears about the possible consequences of the extension of Muscovite au­thority to Kyiv and explains his hostility to the Treaty of Pereiaslav.

The effort to maintain Constantinople’s jurisdiction over Kyiv became one of the most contested issues in the negotiations. Clearly, the delega­tion came under considerable pressure, and Gizel had to devote special attention to the question of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the petition that he addressed to the tsar. He wrote in particular that ‘the law of God through the holy apostle Andrew the First Summoned and the canons of the holy fathers attached and united’ Kyiv with Constantinople. He also noted that the jurisdictional division had been ratified by an ecumenical council, which alone could change it. Other arguments of a more prac­tical nature were adduced as well. One of the most significant was Gizel’s contention that Moscow’s behavior vis-a-vis Kyiv might elicit a negative reaction among the Orthodox clergy beyond the borders of Muscovy that wished to accept the tsar’s sovereignty. This was an obvious reference to the clergy of Belarus and western Ukraine.^[718]

The tsar responded to only a few of the ‘articles’. In particular, he con­firmed the property rights of the church and recognized the metropol­itan’s exclusive judicial authority over his subjects, which was to be respected by the Muscovite voevodas. The other points were deferred. Since a war was in progress, the Muscovite authorities wished to avoid in­curring the hostility of the Ukrainian clergy, but were not prepared to offer a positive response to their petition. And so the jurisdictional issue remained unresolved.^[719] Moscow continued to exert pressure both on the Kyivan clergy and on the Cossack hetman. Conversing with him in January 1655, the tsar’s envoy Artamon Matveev not only referred to Nikon as ‘Patriarch of all Great and Little Rus’’ but also hinted at his pri­macy in relation to the other patriarchs: ‘patriarchs of Constantinople and Jerusalem come to our Grand Sovereign, His Tsarist Highness... and accept the blessing of our Grand Sovereign, the Most Holy Nikon, Patriarch of Moscow and of all Great and Little Rus’’.^[720] In Belarus, the patriarch of Moscow took over Orthodox parishes and whole eparchies with no consultation of any kind with Kyiv.^[721]

The death of Metropolitan Kosov in April 1657 raised the question of the succession to the metropolitan see and, given the circumstances of the Ukrainian-Muscovite alliance and Moscow’s aspirations to establish its authority over the Kyivan metropolitanate, that question took on par­ticular importance. The secular and ecclesiastical authorities of the Het- manate pointedly avoided any consultations on the matter with Moscow. As Metropolitan Kosov lay on his deathbed, it became necessary to ap­point a new bishop for the Chernihiv eparchy. Given the metropolitan’s incapacity, the candidate for the bishopric, Lazar Baranovych, was sent for consecration not to Moscow but to Iasi. This was a more than trans­parent indication of the attitude prevailing in the Hetmanate and the clergy’s fears of Muscovite aspirations. As discussed earlier, the new sobor elected Bishop Dionysii Balaban, a supporter of Vyhovsky, to the metropolitanate. The election was held according to the ‘old laws’, and Moscow was not consulted about it. Soon afterwards, in February 1658, Balaban found himself obliged to clarify the matter with the Muscovite envoy. Asked whether he had sent a mission to ‘present a petition’ to the tsar and the patriarch, Balaban replied that he could not be consecrated by the patriarch of Moscow without the permission of the patriarch of Constantinople, and that Moscow should resolve the question by inde­pendent consultation with the ecumenical patriarch. To all intents and purposes, this was a refusal to submit to Moscow’s authority.^[722]

Regardless of the sharp differences over the jurisdictional question be­tween Moscow on the one hand and the Kyivan clergy on the other, reli­gion sometimes provided a basis for the development of a joint Cossack-Muscovite platform, even when the political aims of the two partners were diametrically opposed. This became particularly apparent at the Muscovite negotiations with the Commonwealth in Vilnius in 1656. Khmelnytsky was categorically opposed to the conclusion of a peace treaty between Muscovy and the Commonwealth, and his delega­tion was not even admitted to the Vilnius talks, but the Muscovite repre­sentatives insisted quite firmly on the religious points suggested by the Cossack administration as issues to be raised at the negotiations. These were the return to the Orthodox on Commonwealth territory of property confiscated from them by the Uniates and the liquidation of the Union.^[723] The Muscovite tsar and the Cossack hetman were also united on the issue of permitting one faith alone—Orthodoxy—to exist on the territory sub­ject to their rule.^[724] In letters and proclamations to the Orthodox of the Commonwealth, the tsar’s courtiers made lavish use of the motif of defending the Orthodox religion.^[725] Yet this solidarity in the defense of Orthodoxy and hostility to the Union and other non-Orthodox churches proved insufficient to establish a firm Orthodox alliance between Muscovy and the Hetmanate.

In his manifesto to foreign rulers on the occasion of his breach with Moscow in 1658, Ivan Vyhovsky set forth the Cossacks’ view of the role of religion in their alliance with the tsar: the Cossacks had risen in defense of the Eastern Church and of their own rights, voluntarily accepting pro­tection from the tsar, who was obliged to preserve their liberties, among other reasons, because of his love of the church. Moscow, however, had chosen to violate Cossack liberties. On learning of this, the Cossacks, being ‘firm in the faith’, had had no choice other than to revolt against the Muscovites.^[726] Explaining the reasons for his rebellion against the tsar in conversation with the Muscovite representative Vasilii Kikin, Vyhovsky went even farther and complained of the oppression of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine by Muscovite voevodas.^[727]

The Belarusian nobleman Kastiantin Paklonsky, a one-time ally of Muscovy who eventually went over to the side of the Commonwealth, summarized the grievances of the Orthodox Ruthenians against their Orthodox protector as follows:

I understood that the war was to be for the liberation of oppressed Rus’, or to be gladdened by a Christian sovereign; instead, we experienced such destruction of houses of God as was practiced by the Tatars: our Christians, who were experi­encing daily persecution by the Uniates, were now taken into eternal slavery, while others were tortured... not only laymen, but our clergy were also taken captive, and we had greater freedom under the Poles than the way our people live today.^[728]

The initial concord in relations between the two Orthodox partners, Pol­ish-Lithuanian Rus’ and the Tsardom of Muscovy, had disappeared. The uneasy alliance between Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus in which Orthodoxy was destined to play a fundamental role still lay ahead.