14 Socioeconomic Relations in Ukrainian Lands, 1569-1648
Poland reached the apogee of its strength and influence in the course of the sixteenth century, at which time the largely Ukrainian-inhabited palatinates in the east decisively enhanced the economic status of the kingdom.
For centuries Ukraine’s economy and trade patterns had been directed southward toward the Crimea, Black Sea, and Mediterranean worlds. By the sixteenth century, however, Ukrainian lands were becoming part of a new western European-oriented economic order.In this new order the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth functioned as a supplier of raw materials to western European countries, from which it received finished products in return. Among the raw materials exported, primarily from Poland’s Baltic Sea port of Gdańsk/Danzig, were lumber products, cattle, hides, and most important of all, grain. The Galicia (Rus’) and Volhynia palatinates in western Ukraine were initially the primary sources of grain, which was transported via the Buh, Wieprz, and San rivers to the Vistula River, at whose mouth was Gdańsk/Danzig. As the demand for Poland’s grain increased, the commonwealth’s magnates and gentry, especially in the newly acquired palatinates of Volhynia, Kiev, and Bratslav, realized the importance of developing ever larger tracts of land for cultivation and of inviting settlers to produce grain and other export products. Thus, the growth of the Baltic grain trade, which reached its height in 1618, increased the appetite of Poland’s nobility for more land and for greater control over those who toiled on it.
14.1 Allegory of the grain trade with Gdańsk/Danzig by the Dutch painter Isaak van den Bloke, 1608.
Also by the sixteenth century, the stage was set for Poland’s nobility to gain control over the country’s peasant agriculturalists.
This was the result of a phenomenon known throughout much of Europe as the second serfdom, or neo-serfdom, whereby the governments of Poland (between 1496 and 1520) and Lithuania (after 1557) placed an increasing number of legal restrictions on the ability of peasants to leave the land where they worked.At the time there were basically two types of landholdings in Poland-Lithuania: (1) state or royal lands administered by the king; and (2) private lands owned either by secular nobles (magnates and gentry) or by the church (bishops and monasteries). The private lands were known as manorial estates (latifundia), which usually comprised a manorial farm (Ukrainian: fil’varok; Polish: folwark) divided into three basic parts: lands belonging to the landlord (demesne fields); lands belonging to the landlord’s village administrator; and strip land holdings worked by individual peasants. After 1573 in Poland and 1588 in Lithuania peasants were forbidden under any conditions to leave the manorial estate in which they resided. In return for use of the land, the peasant serf was required to compensate the landlord. Compensation usually took the form of unpaid labor (corvee), which varied from three to seven days a week depending on location and whether the land was owned by individual nobles, the state, or the church.
14.2 Peasant-serfs sowing lands on a manorial estate.
Neo-serfdom came into being first in those areas that had particular economic significance, which in the case of Ukraine included the grain-producing areas in the Galicia and Belz palatinates nearest to the eastern tributaries of the Vistula River. These areas were also among the more densely populated regions of the country where peasants had smaller plots and were more likely to become indebted to the local landlord. By 1580 the population density of the Galicia (Rus’), Belz, Volhynia, Podolia, and Bratslav palatinates was on average fourteen inhabitants per square kilometer, while in the Kiev palatinate it was as low as three inhabitants per square kilometer.
To correct this demographic imbalance and to increase productivity on their estates, landlords enticed peasants eastward by offering them exemptions from rent or labor obligations during periods that might last fifteen, twenty, or even thirty years. Consequently, whereas certain restrictions on peasants did exist in the Kiev palatinate, full serfdom was not implemented there under Polish rule.
14.3 Characteristic dress (in male and female pairs) of 17th-century magnates, gentry, town dwellers, and peasants in Poland.
There was a great discrepancy in landholding patterns within Poland’s largely Ukrainian-inhabited palatinates. Only one-quarter of the land was owned by the state as royal estates and forests. The vast majority was in private hands, with about seventy percent held by the secular nobles and five percent by the church. State lands were found for the most part in the frontier areas of the eastern and southern Kiev palatinate, in southern Bratslav, and in the mountainous areas of southern Galicia; church-held lands were concentrated in the northernwestern Kiev palatinate and the hinterland surrounding the city of Kiev; while noble-owned lands were widespread in all palatinates.
Nearly half of all noble landholdings were in the hands of a few powerful magnate families. Polish magnates (such as the Potockis, Kalinowskis, and Zamojskis) had holdings scattered throughout Ukrainian lands. The largest landowners, however, were noble families of Orthodox Rus’ origin, such as the Zbaraz’kyis, Korets’kyis, and most especially the Vyshnevets’kyis and Ostroz’kyis. The Vyshnevets’kyi holdings were originally based at Vyshnivets’ in southwestern Volhynia, although the family’s largest estates were actually in the Left Bank of the Dnieper River in the eastern regions of the Kiev palatinate, where by the seventeenth century they had 230,000 subjects under their control.
The Ostroz’kyi family was even wealthier.
Based in the town of Ostroh, the Ostroz’kyi holdings covered most of the Volhynia and western Kiev palatinates. For instance, the leading member of the family and the palatine of Kiev, Prince Kostiantyn Ostroz’kyi, was after the king reputed to be the wealthiest person in the entire Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. By the outset of the seventeenth century Kostiantyn Ostroz’kyi’s holdings included 57 towns, 857 villages, and 111 manorial estates. The Ostroz’kyi, Vyshnevets’kyi, and other magnate families also commanded large private armies that were used to protect their property as well as to serve in defense of the commonwealth’s southern and eastern frontiers.
14.4 Prince Kostiantyn Ostroz’kyi (1526-1608), marshal of Volhynia, palatine of Kiev, candidate for the throne of Poland and Muscovy.
It was, of course, beyond the capacity of any one noble family to manage such vast expanses of landed property. Therefore, nobles participated in the socalled arenda system, whereby they leased to individual managers their fixed assets, such as grain mills, breweries, distilleries, manorial farms, and even the right to collect taxes and customs duties in their name. Among the managers most favored to operate the arenda system were Jews.
Yiddish-speaking Jews of the Ashkenazic tradition had been emigrating from Germanic lands to Poland and Lithuania ever since the late thirteenth century. At that time some had also accepted invitations to settle in cities of the Kievan Rus’ principality of Galicia. Later, with the incorporation of the rest of Ukraine into the Polish Kingdom in 1569, a new wave of Jews was encouraged to emigrate eastward and function as estate managers (arendars) and money lenders for Ukraine’s large magnate landowners. By 1648, the number of Jews in Poland’s southeastern, or “Ukrainian” palatinates reached about 84,000, nearly three-quarters of whom were concentrated in Galicia, Belz, and Volhynia.
Jewish communities flourished on noble-and royal (state)-owned landed estates, and the enserfed peasantry considered Jews—together with Polish and polonized Rus’ landlords—to be part of the ruling strata in an increasingly oppressive society.
14.5 Jeremi Wisniowiecki (1612-1651), Polish magnate, descendant of the Rus’ Vyshnevets’kyi family, staunch Roman Catholic and opponent of the Zaporozhian Cossacks.
For their part, the Orthodox Rus’ nobles (both the powerful magnates and lesser gentry) welcomed the socioeconomic privileges given them by a state like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In this “republic of nobles,” the dominant element in society was unquestionably the nobility (szlachta). Sixteenth-century Poland, moreover, was characterized by rapid economic growth—enhanced by the grain trade to western European markets—and wide-ranging cultural achievements. The humanistic ideas of the Italian Renaissance were flourishing, as were ideas connected with the Protestant Reformation. The Polish language was being transformed into a medium suitable for creative belletristic and scholarly learning, book publishing was on the increase, and the country’s secondary schools and universities, after 1564 often staffed by Roman Catholic priests of the new and vigorous Jesuit Order, were among the best in Europe.
The Orthodox Rus’ magnates and gentry in the eastern lands of the commonwealth could not help but be attracted to the achievements of Polish culture. Not only did the Rus’ nobility of Ukraine and Belarus’ loyally serve the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, they also adopted Polish speech and manners, and some even converted to the “Polish” religion, Roman Catholicism. Among the Orthodox Rus’ families who embraced the Roman Catholic faith and became its most ardent defenders were Ukraine’s largest landowners, the Ostroz’kyis, Vyshnevets’kyis, Korets’kyis, and Zbaraz’kyis.
All this was happening during the first half of the seventeenth century, when Ukrainian lands were engulfed by ongoing social revolts and military conflict (see below, Chapter 16).Very often that conflict has been described rather simplistically as one “between Poles and Ukrainians.” Perhaps it would be more appropriate to speak not of Polish-Ukrainian conflict, but rather of civil conflict among the Rus’ (Ukrainians) themselves. In terms of ideology, that conflict was couched in terms of religion and ethnicity. On the one hand were those Rus’ who embraced Roman Catholicism and who identified with Polish culture and language—and among them were the Uniates, that is, former Orthodox adherents who accepted the Church Union with Rome. On the other hand were those Rus’ who upheld the traditional understanding that Rus’ ethnicity and Orthodox faith were inseparable. For its part, the Polish state added to friction among the Rus’ by its policy of supporting Roman Catholic converts and Uniates and suppressing protests by Zaporozhian Cossacks and peasants discontented with their socioeconomic status.
The culmination of Ukraine’s conflict came with the uprising of 1648, which might best be seen as a struggle between three antagonistic forces symbolized by: (1) Jeremi Wisnowiecki, the polonized magnate of Rus’ descent (the Vyshnevets’kyi family) who succeeded in becoming part of the Polish ruling elite; (2) Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi, the Cossack leader who wanted access but was being kept out of the sociopolitical system dominated by Polish nobles; and (3) the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who did not want any part of a system in which political, legal, and socioeconomic power rested in the hands of the nobility.