The Cossacks of Zaporozhia

An excellent insight into the way of life of the Zaporozhian Cossacks comes from the pen of Guillaume 1c Vasscur de Beauplan, a French military engineer who spent fifteen years (1630-1647) in Poland in the service of its army.

The valor of these Cossacks having been mentioned, it will not be out of place to speak [here] of their customs and activities. Among these people are found indi­viduals expert in all the trades necessary for human life: house and ship carpen­ters, Cartwrights, blacksmiths, armorers, tanners, harness makers, shoemakers, coopers, tailors, and so forth. 1'hey are very skillful at preparing saltpeter, which is found in abundance in these regions, and make from it excellent gunpowder. I'he women are employed at spinning flax and wool, from which they make cloth and fabrics for their everyday use. All are well able to till the soil, sow, harvest, make bread, prepare foods of all sorts, brew beer, make mead, braha, spirits, etc. As well, there is not one of them, of any age, sex or rank whatever, who does not try to drink more than his companion, and to outdo him in revelry. What is more, there are not Christians [anywhere else] who are their equals in not caring for the morrow.

It is quite true that in general they are all proficient in the whole range of crafts.... In short, they are all quite clever, but they limit themselves only to useful and necessary matters, and especially to those relating to country living.

The fertile land produces grain in such abundance that often they do not know what to do with it, the more so because they have no navigable rivers that empty into the sea, except the Borysthenes [Dnieper], which is blocked fifty leagues below Kiev by [a series of] thirteen rapids....

There is nothing about them coarser than their clothing. They are sly, crafty, clever, [and yet] sincerely generous, without ulterior motives or ambitions to become very rich. They greatly value their liberty, and would not want to live without it. That is why the Cossacks, when they consider themselves to be kept under too tight a rein, arc so inclined to revolt and rebel against the lords of their country. Thus, seven or eight years rarely pass without a mutiny or uprising.

Beyond that, they are a faithless people, treacherous, perfidious, and to be trusted only with circumspection. They are a very robust people, easily enduring heat and cold, hunger and thirst. They are tireless in war, daring, courageous, or rather reckless, placing no value on their own lives.

source: Guillaume Lc Vasscur, Sieur de Beauplan,.4 Description of Ukraine (1660), translated by Andrew B. Pernal and Dennis F. Essar (Cambridge, Mass. 1993), pp. 11-13.

The Zaporozhian Sich was governed by the principle of equality. Accordingly, all major decisions, especially those pertaining to military policy and foreign alli­ances, were made during a general meeting called the rada. In practice, there were ‘class’ distinctions even within the sich, so that by the end of the sixteenth century it was common practice for two separate rady to meet: one for the officers (starshyna) and one for the rank and file (chern). Neither rada dominated the other, and officers always felt that their policy decisions could be overturned - even brutally - by the rank and file. Departing from subsequent romanticized images of the supposedly egalitarian existence in Zaporozhia, one historian, Linda Gordon, has recently suggested that ‘the system of Cossack self-government was not democracy but dictatorship tempered by mob intervention.’³

The head of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, elected by all members present at the rada, at first was called simply the elder (starshyi), and later the sich otaman or koshovyi otaman.

The Cossacks in Polish society

When, as a result of the Union of Lublin in 1569, Zaporozhia and the Ukrainian steppe came under the nominal authority of Poland, the Cossacks - whether at the sich or in the towns farther north - considered themselves subjects of the Polish king. The rugged life on the steppe, however, and their evolution into a valued military force imbued the Cossacks with a sense of independence that inev­itably clashed with the efforts of the magnates to extend further their control over what previously had been uninhabited and uncultivated territory. Nor was the struggle simply one between peasants seeking freedom and nobles trying to enserf them. Instead, the Cossacks, whether in the fortress towns or in Zaporozhia, became one of the many rival interest groups in a Ukrainian society that was increasingly coming under the influence of Polish social norms.

For instance, town Cossacks in the service of the large Rus' magnates (the Ostroz'kyis, Vyshnevets'kyis, etc.) tended to increase the influence of that social group in Polish society. In response, Poland’s kings would themselves try to entice the Cossacks into the service of the crown by granting them privileges. Also, those gentry who lost lands or became indebted to the magnates found an outlet for their discontent in flight to the sich. Even among magnates, there were different views of the Cossacks.

With the growth of Cossack military potential, it was inevitable that conflict, whether motivated by personal discontent or by discontent with policy, would arise between the independent-minded steppe frontier dwellers and the local authorities. In fact, beginning in the final decade of the sixteenth century and lasting for nearly the next half century, there occurred a series of uprisings whose Cossack leaders (Kosyns'kyi, Nalyvaiko, Loboda, Zhmailo, Pavliuk, Ostrianyn) were subsequently immortalized as defenders of the traditional Cossack liberties and of Ukraine’s struggle for freedom. The causes of these uprisings varied, but there were a few general trends.

Throughout this whole period, the Cossacks never questioned the premise that they were subjects of the Polish king. In fact, what they wanted was to become recognized as a distinct estate with its own ‘traditional liberties’ within Polish- Lithuanian society. While it is true that by the early seventeenth century sharp dis­tinctions had evolved among the Cossacks, some kind of special status within Poland for the group as a whole was still the goal.

The legal distinctions within Cossack society were actually the result of Polish governmental policy, in particular that of the king. In an attempt to impose some kind of control over the ever-growing number of Cossacks and to ensure their mil­itary service to the crown instead of to local magnates or foreign powers, Polish kings introduced a policy of registration. The first registration occurred in 1572, and several others took place during the following years, the most ambitious per­haps being that of King Stefan Batory (reigned 1575-1586) in 1577. According to his program, the so-called registered Cossacks were (1) recognized as being in the Polish military service; (2) no longer to be subject to the control of the local gentry, or szZawhen the last Jagiellonian ruler died and the monarch was henceforth elected by the Diet. Polish kings were becoming more and more dependent on the whims of the magnates and gentry. Only those two factions of the nobility could, through the Diet, authorize the nec­essary funds or supply military forces to sustain Poland’s foreign ventures. But most often they were reluctant to do so, especially when it seemed to them that a particular king, whether for dynastic or for economic reasons, was too eager to enter into war with Muscovy, or Sweden, or Moldavia. Faced with such internal political opposition, Poland’s elected kings saw in the Cossacks a ready-made force that could be used to further their own foreign policy and military goals without their having to depend on the cooperation of the noble estates. This intent is what gave rise to the policy of registration, whereby Poland’s kings would grant or restore Cossack privileges in return for military service. For their part, the Polish and polonized Rus' magnates and gentry opposed these direct rela­tions between king and Cossacks, not to mention the continuing existence of a group that remained outside their control. The Rus' magnates in Ukraine, how­ever, favored the existence of the registered Cossacks as long as they remained in their service and not that of the king.

The international role of the Cossacks

The vast majority of the unregistered Cossacks, in Zaporozhia, continued their policy of providing short-term service to Poland’s kings and seeking alliances with foreign powers. During the last decade of the sixteenth century, they accepted an invitation from the Habsburg emperor of the Holy Roman Empire to join in a crusade against the infidel Ottomans. They took this occasion to raid and loot at will the Ottoman provinces of Walachia and Moldavia. Then, in the second dec­ade of the seventeenth century, they fought on the side of Poland’s king Zygmunt III during his frequent invasions of Muscovy. It was also during these decades that they built a large naval fleet, which, under the leadership of their daring hetman Petro Sahaidachnyi, raided Ottoman cities along the northern as well as southern shores of the Black Sea. In the tradition of the Varangian Rus' almost 800 years before, Sahaidachnyi’s Cossacks even plundered the outskirts of the impregnable Ottoman capital of Istanbul.

The Ottomans held the Poles to blame for the exploits of their unruly Cossack subjects, and not surprisingly, Polish-Ottoman relations deteriorated as a result. In the spring of 1620, a combined Turkish-Tatar army defeated a Polish force at the Battle of Cecora/Tsetsora Fields, near the Moldavian town of Ia§i. The way to Poland was now open. The Ottomans made further military preparations, and the following spring, in 1621, they advanced with an army of over 100,000. In despera­tion, the Poles called on the services of Hetman Sahaidachnyi, and it was his force of 40,000 Cossacks (drawn from Zaporozhia as well as from the ranks of the regis­tered) that made possible a Polish victory over the Turks at the Battle of Khotyn in northern Moldavia, near the border with Podolia.

Thus, during the first half of the seventeenth century, a seemingly unbreakable cycle arose within the Crimean-Ottoman-Polish triangle that surrounded Cossack Ukraine. The Zaporozhian Cossacks would raid the Crimea and the Ottoman Empire. In response, the Ottoman Empire would threaten and sometimes carry out military invasions against Poland. The Polish government would demand that the Zaporozhians cease their anti-Ottoman and anti-Crimean raids, and to back up its demands would periodically send punitive expeditions to intervene in Zapo­rozhian affairs. The Zaporozhians would rebel against this interference, and wars against Poland would result, with sometimes one side, sometimes the other win­ning. In the end, nothing decisive ever occurred, and the cycle was repeated.

The Polish-Cossack conflicts before 1648, however limited in scope to the bor­der regions near Zaporozhia, witnessed much of the brutality that accompanies any civil conflict. Polish frontier aristocrats like the hetmans Stanislaw Zolkiewski, Stanislaw Koniecpolski, and Stanislaw and Mikolaj Potocki seemed to take special delight in trying to put down what they considered the Cossack rabble, and their victories at the battles of Lubni (1596), Pereiaslav (1630), and Kumeiky (1637) left a heritage of bitter hatred. For their part, the Zaporozhian Cossacks had no illu­sions about the Polish szlachta, and they felt betrayed by their own registered Cos­sacks, who often sided with the Poles. They felt especially betrayed by the king, who seemed ever ready to call upon their services for campaigns in Moldavia, or Muscovy, or Sweden, or against the Ottomans, but careless of living up to his promises of greater privileges or payments. Because of the Polish system of government, however, even if the kings were desirous of fulfilling their promises, they could almost never effectively do so over the heads of the szlachta opposition. Thus, the pre-1648 period left the Zaporozhian Cossacks with a deep-seated hatred and distrust of the Poles, combined with an ingrained historical memory of their own courageous hetmans such as Dmytro Vyshnevets'kyi and Petro Sahai­dachnyi, their successful campaigns against the Crimean Tatars and Ottoman Turks, and their ability to circumvent Polish aristocratic control over their lives. It was on this era (the 1630s) that Nikolai Gogol', a nineteenth-century Ukrainian author who wrote in Russian, based his famous novel of Cossack revolt against Polish rule, Taras Bul'ba (1835).

The role of the Cossacks in Ukrainian life was not limited, however, to military raids and protection of the frontier. Before long, they combined their love of freedom and autonomy with a deep commitment to defend the Orthodox faith. The ideological link between the Cossack struggle for autonomy and its defense of Orthodoxy was in large part forged during the first two decades of the seventeenth century by losyf Kurtsevych-Koriiatovych, the archimandrite of the Terekhtemyriv Monastery (halfway between Kiev and Cherkasy) and Hetman Petro Sahaidachnyi. A native of Galicia and probably of noble descent, Sahai- dachnyi was educated at the Ostrih Academy, where he was imbued with an Orthodox spirit. He then went to the sich, where the Zaporozhians elected him hetman. He not only increased the commitment of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Orthodox faith, but also led them in numerous victories against the Tatars and the Turks, and - in the service of Poland - against the Muscovites. In return for his loyalty to Poland, so crucial to the king on the eve of the 1621 Battle of Khotyn against the Ottoman Turks, Sahaidachnyi included in his demands the full restoration of the Orthodox hierarchy, most of whose eparchial sees had been left vacant after the Union of Brest in 1596.

Meanwhile, during the first two decades of the seventeenth century Kiev itself was undergoing a revival which was to make it once again the center of Rus'- Ukrainian culture. The Monastery of the Caves (Pechers'ka Lavra), founded under laroslav the Wise during the mid-eleventh century, was headed from 1599 to 1625 by another native of Galicia, lelysei Pletenets'kyi. While Sahaidachnyi was raising the military and political prestige of the Cossacks, Pletenets'kyi was busily engaged in creating a new basis for Orthodox cultural activity in Kiev. In 1615, he brought to the monastery a printing press from Striatyn, in Galicia, and during its first fifteen years of operation (1616-1630) it produced forty titles, more than any other press in the rest of Ukraine or Belarus. Among the titles were works of liter­ature, history, and religious polemic, liturgical books, and texts for the growing number of schools. The last category included Pamva Berynda’s Leksykon slaveno- rosskii (Slaveno-Rusyn Lexicon, 1627), the first dictionary in the East Slavic world, which, together with another contemporary work, published elsewhere, Meletii Smotryts'kyi’s Grammatika slavenskaia (Slavonic Grammar, 1619), established a standard for the Church Slavonic language that was to be used in Ukraine for the next two centuries.

Pletenets'kyi also brought to Kiev’s Monastery of the Caves a group of Galician intellectuals (lov Borets'kyi, Zakhariia Kopystens'kyi, Lavrentii Kukil') who had been trained in L'viv’s Stauropegial Brotherhood school. Following the L'viv tra­dition, Kiev received its own brotherhood and school in 1615, where a Greco- Slavonic curriculum was established according to the L'viv model. Moreover, in the midst of this cultural revival, Hetman Sahaidachnyi moved his administration to Kiev, making it once again the seat of political and military power as well as the cultural center of Ukrainian lands. And to show his further support of the Ortho­dox revival, the hetman enrolled all his Zaporozhian Cossacks in the recently established Kiev Brotherhood.

Buoyed by the support of the Cossacks and their dynamic leader Sahaidachnyi, the Orthodox clergy and lay leaders felt that the time had come to restore the organizational framework of their church. By the second decade of the seven­teenth century, the metropolitan’s office and all the Eastern-rite eparchies on Belarusan and Ukrainian lands in Poland-Lithuania with the exception of L'viv were in the hands of the Uniates. The Cossacks, however, had refused to allow the Uniate metropolitans - Ipatii Potii and his successor, Veliamyn Ruts'kyi (reigned 1614-1637) - to take up their seat of Kiev. Now, in 1620, the Orthodox group took advantage of a visit by the patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophanes, who in October of that year stopped in Kiev on his way to Muscovy. They persuaded the patriarch to ordain an Orthodox metropolitan for Kiev as well as four bishops for the sees of Przemysl, Polatsk, Volodymyr-Volyns'kyi, and Luts'k. Early the following year, two more Orthodox bishops were ordained, for Chelm and Pinsk. The ordinations were performed in secret and without the approval of the Polish government. When the government found out, it accused Patriarch Theophanes of being a Turkish spy and outlawed the newly appointed metropolitan and bishops.

In response, in 1621 the new Orthodox metropolitan, lov Borets'kyi (reigned 1620-1631), and the six bishops published their first manifesto. Of particular interest is their characterization of the Cossacks:

We all know about the Cossacks, that these chivalrous men are of our race, are of our kin, and are true Orthodox Christians.... They are the descendants of the glorious Rus', of the seed of Japheth who fought [Byzantine] Greece on land and on sea. They are the descen­dants of that warlike race which under Oleh, the Rus' monarch, attacked Constantinople. They are the same as those who with Volodymyr, the sainted king of [Kievan] Rus', con­quered Greece, Macedonia, and Illyria. Their ancestors, together with Volodymyr, were baptized and accepted Christianity from the church at Constantinople, and even to this day they are born, are baptized, and live in this faith.⁴

Referring to more recent times, the Orthodox bishops stated: ‘[The Cossacks’] second purpose is to set the prisoner free.... It is truly said that no one in the whole world does so much for the benefit of the persecuted and oppressed Chris­tians... as the Army of Zaporozhia with their daring and their victories. What other peoples achieve by words and discourses, the Cossacks achieve by their actions.’⁵ The Cossacks were now armed with a historical ideology and viewed by the highest Orthodox authorities as latter-day descendants of the biblical Japheth and the Kievan Rus' princes.

The registered Cossacks, in particular, took advantage of the situation and put forth a new demand in all their negotiations with the Poles: recognition of the already-appointed bishops and thereby the full reconstitution of the Orthodox church in Poland-Lithuania. During the next decade, the Polish king Zygmunt III often made promises regarding Orthodoxy, but he refused to recognize the con­secration of its seven hierarchs. Finally, following the death of the king in 1632, a period of interregnum ensued during which the Polish Diet prepared for a new election. Several Orthodox Rus' noblemen seized the opportunity to introduce the Cossack question into the royal electoral debates. For the first time they demanded that the Cossacks be recognized as a noble estate within the Polish social structure, and they renewed their call for the legalization of the Orthodox hierarchy. Not surprisingly, there was great opposition from the Polish szlachta. The future King Wladyslaw IV (reigned 1632-1648) needed troops for a new cam­paign against Muscovy, however, and was therefore predisposed to favoring the Cossack requests. Although the question of noble status was decided against the Cossacks, the new king, through personal persuasion, was able in 1632 to push through a compromise agreement known as the ‘Pacification of the Greek Faith.’

The compromise of 1632 finally regulated Orthodox church life in Poland- Lithuania. The metropolitan and bishops were to be elected by the Orthodox clergy and nobility, confirmed by the Polish king, and blessed by the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople. The secretly elected Orthodox hierarchy of 1620 was not recognized, however. With regard to Orthodox-Uniate relations, the eparchies of the Metropolitanate of Kiev were divided. Kiev, L'viv, Przemysl, Luts'k, and the newly founded Mahiliou went to the Orthodox; Polatsk, Chelm, Volodymyr-Volyns'kyi, Pinsk, and Smolensk went to the Uniates. Moreover, each church was to have its own metropolitan of Kiev. The Orthodox metropolitan was to reside in Kiev itself, the Uniate metropolitan in Vilnius or Navahrudak in Lithuania. As well, Orthodox schools, printing presses, brotherhoods, and new churches were permitted; several churches and monasteries held by the Uniates (including all but one in Kiev) were returned to the Orthodox church; and Orthodox adherents were once again permitted to hold office in municipal gov­ernment. Despite protests from the Uniate metropolitan and Polish Catholic bish­ops, the king upheld the agreement of 1632 and reconfirmed it three years later.

Taking advantage of the favorable political situation, Orthodox nobles in the Polish Diet nominated in November 1632 a fellow deputy, Archimandrite Petro Mohyla (Petru Movila), as metropolitan of Kiev (reigned 1632-1647). Within days, the nomination was approved by the king and a blessing requested from the ecu­menical patriarch. This meant that the recently elected Metropolitan Isaia Kopyns'kyi (reigned 1631-1632), the successor to Metropolitan Borets'kyi secretly elected in 1620, was removed from office.

The new and dynamic Metropolitan Mohyla/Movila was the son of the Roma­nian Orthodox ruler of Walachia and Moldavia. In 1627, just two years after his arrival in Kiev, he was made archimandrite of the city’s influential Monastery of the Caves. The ambitious and talented Mohyla was convinced that the survival of Orthodoxy depended on the creation of a well-educated group of clerics trained in the best traditions of their religious antagonists, the Jesuits. Accordingly, he sent monks to Poland to be educated, and he opened a new school on the Jesuit Latin model at the Kiev monastery.

Mohyla’s policies were by no means universally accepted within Poland- Lithuania’s Orthodox milieu. Actually, the metropolitan’s election at the end of 1632 represented a victory for the Orthodox Rus' nobles over the Cossacks, who