THE EUROPEAN CONTEXT

One of the most widespread and intense forms of political conflict in early modern Europe was the power struggle between the abso­lutistically-inclined monarchs and the privilege-minded nobilities.

The regional elites resisted stubbornly. In the middle of the 17th century, a wave of anti-royalist uprisings swept through Portugal, England, the Netherlands, Catalonia, Naples and France.² Their results were varied. The first three rebellions proved to be success­ful while the last three failed. While local circumstances often pre­determined the outcome of specific uprisings, it was clear that, taken as a whole, Western Europe was in the throes of what Trevor- Roper has called “the crisis of the 17th Century.”³

What was happening in the eastern part of the continent during this age of crisis? Did it also experience the sovereign vs. elite con­flicts that had flared up in the West? Eager to extend their generali­zations, Western historians looked eastwards with unprecedented interest. And they did find a major upheaval there in the mid 17th century: the Ukrainian Uprising of 1648, led by Bohdan Khmel­nytskyi shook the entire region and had far-ranging effects. How­ever, the vast revolt of the Ukrainian Cossacks and peasants was essentially a reaction of the lower orders against the oppression of the Polish or Polonized nobility.

But had they looked a little further, historians would have been richly rewarded. A series of anti-royalist uprisings did take place in Eastern Europe; however, they occurred roughly fifty years later than did those in the West. (This might have been expected in view of Eastern Europe’s pronounced time-lag with regard to develop­ments in the West.) Thus, in 1697, the Livonian nobility, led by Johann Reinhold von Patkul, sharply challenged the fiscal policies of the Swedish Vasas; in 1703, Ferenc Rakoczi II began his eight year long rebellion against the Habsburgs; in 1706, Stanislaw Lesz- czynski, representing the republican traditions of the Polish szlachta and aided by the Swedes, replaced the absolutistically-minded August II as King of Poland; in 1708, Ivan Mazepa, Hetman of Ukraine and spokesman for the rising Ukrainian elite, rose against Peter I; and in 1711 Dimitrii Kantemir, Hospodar of Moldavia, rebelled together with the boiars of the land, against the Ottoman Sultan. Thus, as the Fronde was becoming a thing of the past in the West, variations of the Fronde were just beginning to get underway in Eastern Europe.

It is in the context of this general East European phenomenon that the present study of Mazepa and Orlyk must be viewed. But, before dwelling on these Ukrainian frondeurs, it would be fruitful to examine several other general aspects of the opposition of nobili­ties to royal absolutism.

Both in Western and Eastern Europe the rationale for the nobles’ rebellion was basically the same: the rebels invariably sought to protect “the ancient rights and liberties” of their land. The upris­ings were not against the monarchy as such but rather against sovereigns who tampered with the status quo. And the preservation of ancient ways and customs, which every traditionalist society considers to be among its highest moral prerogatives, justified, at least to the rebels themselves, their actions.⁴ Of course, the fact that the traditional order and the nobilities’ self-interest were mutually supportive explained to a large extent their militant conservatism.

In Eastern Europe the two most powerful nobilities, those of Poland-Lithuania and of Hungary, felt that they had not only a moral duty but also a legal right to resist an unjust, that is, a tradition-breaking sovereign. The famous Hungarianjuj resistendi explicitly emphasized this point. In Poland-Lithuania, the right of the estates to confederate in order to protect their interests implicitly gave the nobility a legal right to resist the king, by force if neces­sary. Since the elites of Livonia, Moldavia and the Ukraine modeled themselves very consciously on the Polish nobility and its privi­leges, they too felt that rebellion against the sovereign Wasjustified if their rights had been transgressed against and their traditions disregarded by their rulers.⁵

Similarities existed not only in the nobilities’ rationale for rebel­lion but also in the forms of this resistance. (This is not to say, of course, that all the rebellions of the nobility were essentially alike.) Compared to the spontaneous outbursts of the peasantry, the rebel­lions of the elite were much more deliberately planned. As men who had immeasurably more to lose than lowly peasants, nobles usually reached their decision to rebel only after much preparation and even more hesitation. Therefore, elaborate conspiracies often preceded or accompanied open opposition.⁶

Besides the obvious advantages of avoiding detection, conspiracy provided its participants with much greater flexibility than did a large-scale uprising: a small band of conspirators could easily alter, postpone or abandon their designs when this was deemed appro­priate. Moreover, a conspiracy was a relatively precise method of resistance since it allowed its participants to aim at specific goals— the abolition of a hated set of innovations or the removal of overly zealous representatives of the King—without upsetting the entire political and socio-economic order of which the conspirators them­selves were a part.

Another feature which was very marked in all the anti-royalist uprisings, except in the rather atypical case of England, was the dependence of the rebels on foreign aid.

This tendency to seek foreign supporters was strengthened by the timing of many of the rebellions. Frequently they broke out when sovereigns were involved in wars and could not bring all their troops to bear on the rebels. This was especially evident in all of the East European uprisings. From the sovereigns’ point of view, such actual or potential alliances between their internal and external foes posed an exceedingly fearsome threat. But the allies themselves also faced serious difficulties.

There was, first of all, the problem of reliability. Neither the rebels nor their foreign supporters could be sure, once they com­mitted themselves, that the aid which had been promised them would be forthcoming (or ongoing). For example, when France negotiated peace with the Habsburgs in 1714, it promptly cut off aid to the Hungarians, whose anti-Habsburg rebellion it had en­couraged, leaving Rakoczi in a hopeless situation. Foreign sov­ereigns who meddled in their foes’ internal problems were also subject to disillusionment and loss. Believing PatkuFs assurances about the imminence of an anti-Swedish rebellion in Livonia, August II launched an invasion of that land only to find, to his dismay, that most Livonians preferred Swedes to Saxons.

Conflicts of interest were, as always, quite common among the allies. In 1676 the Dutch promised to aid the Portuguese against their common enemy, the King of Spain. But soon afterwards the Dutch-Portuguese colonial rivalry became so intense as to dis­courage all attempts at cooperation. When the French came to the aid of the Catalans they found the latter happy to accept their mili­tary assistance against the Spanish King but most Unenthusiastic about recognizing French sovereignty. In 1711, Pylyp Orlyk and his Tatar allies launched an initially successful invasion of Ukraine. However, the Tatars’ insistence on taking captives from among the populace that Orlyk was trying to win over to his side soon led to a conflict between the allies and the failure of the invasion.

The invitation of foreign allies could backfire against the rebels in yet another fashion. Often the appearance of foreign troops aroused deep-rooted feelings of xenophobia among an otherwise uncommitted populace. This could lead to a complete loss of local support for the rebels and an even greater dependence on external backing which, in turn, allowed sovereigns to represent the rebels as puppets of foreign interests. Yet, despite the troubles which foreign entanglements entailed, almost every nobility which rose against its sovereign sought aid from abroad. Usually the rebels found their monarch’s enemies to be receptive—for their own in­terest, of course—to their pleas.

Once open rebellion broke out both sides were quick to employ propaganda and polemics to rally support for their causes. Indeed, in the conflicts of the nobility vs. the sovereigns in the 17-18th centuries, secular issues, such as the distribution of political power in a society, replaced religious questions as the primary topics of public debate throughout most of Europe.

Despite these similarities, there were also marked differences be­tween the uprisings of the nobility in the eastern and western parts of the continent. In the West, the numerically large and powerful bourgeoisie frequently played a prominent role in the anti-royalist movements. In Naples the rebellion against the Spanish kitfg was primarily an urban affair while in the Netherlands it was die opu­lent burghers of Holland and Zeeland who led the struggle against the Habsburgs. Townsmen were also prominent in anti-royalist causes in England, France and Catalonia. This was rarely the case in Eastern Europe. There the nobility had antagonized the already impoverished towns to such an extent that, despite royal exactions, they preferred to side with their sovereigns. In the few cases when townsmen did join the rebels it was usually under duress. (A notable exception was the loyal support which Gdansk offered to Stanislaw Leszczynski in 1713.)

Ethnic loyalties and antagonisms were more apparent in the rebellions in the East than in the West. In England and France the ethnic dimension was almost totally absent; in Naples and Portu­gal it was noticeable but of minor importance; only in Catalonia and the Netherlands was antagonism against another people, i.e., the Spaniards as well as a tyrannical monarch, significant enough to urge on the rebels. On the other hand, in Eastern Europe, where all the sovereigns were foreigners to their subjects and where ethnic heterogeneity was much greater (to a large extent the towns were ethnically distinct from the nobility-dominated countryside), eth­nic tensions played an important role in the uprisings. The anti­German feelings of the Poles and Hungarians fueled their ani­mosity toward their Saxon and Habsburg sovereigns; the Mol­davians despised not only the infidel Ottomans but also the Greek Phanariots who, with the backing of the Porte, were beginning to dominate their land; a common faith barely disguised the mutual dislike that Ukrainians and Russians felt for each other (Mazepa ordered his men to avoid marriages with Russian women and Peter had to issue an ukaz forbidding Russians to insult Ukrainians).⁷ Thus, East European nobles, much more so than their Western counterparts, feared that not only would they be oppressed by tyrannical monarchs, but that they would come to be dominated by a foreign people.

It was this aspect of the uprisings that 19th and 20th century East European historians seized upon and exaggerated, indeed, distorted, so as to make the rebellions of the nobility fit the pattern of modern struggles for national liberation. As a result Rakoczi, Leszczynski, Patkul, Kantemir, Mazepa and Orlyk were represented by many modern historians as, first and foremost, fighters for their national causes and enshrined as such in their respective national pantheons. It should be stressed, however, that while patriotism—as opposed to nationalism—certainly motivated all of these men to a greater or lesser degree, it was the defense of traditional, estate-oriented rights and privileges which was the primary concern of their revolts.⁸

Finally, the East European rebellions shared yet another trait: they all failed. And one of the effects of these failures was the ap­pearance of the first all-East European political emigration. One after another, Patkul, Leszczynski, Mazepa, Orlyk, Rakoczi and Kantemir with their followers fled abroad to commence there the classic lifestyle of political emigres. With funds and supporters con­stantly dwindling, they invariably slid into complete dependence on their foreign patrons who often cynically exploited them for their own purposes. When their usefulness ran out, they were fre­quently dismissed or forgotten by their backers to whom they then appeared as nuisances. Always hoping to return to their home­lands, preferably but not necessarily in triumph, the East European emigres became involved in countless and often unrealistic schemes to recoup their losses. The flighty and transitory field of diplomatic intrigue became the stage on which they acted. Some, like Patkul, Leszczynski and Orlyk, would mount serious second efforts. And their ceaseless if rarely successful activity would continue to cause irritation and even some anxiety to their erstwhile overlords. It would also lead to numerous attempts on the lives of the emigres. Nevertheless, despite their proven commitment to their causes, their efforts would ultimately prove fruitless.⁹