The Ukrainian Cossacks

The Origins

At the dawn of the modern world, the Eurasian steppe was undergoing significant and lasting change. The disintegration of the Golden Horde in the course of the fifteenth century into smaller and weaker khanates not­ably altered the geopolitical configuration of the steppe.

In the mid-sixteenth century, the two most powerful states of Eastern Europe, the Tsardom of Muscovy and the Kingdom of Poland, ‘set out’ almost simultaneously for the east. In the brief period between 1552 and 1556 the Muscovite forces managed not only to defeat and subjugate the two largest Tatar khanates on the Volga, those of Kazan and Astrakhan, but also to subordinate the Siberian khanate and the Circassian and Kabardian princes.^[23] The attempt of Tsar Ivan the Terrible to expand his dominions to the west turned out unsuccessfully, however, giving rise to the lengthy Livonian War (1558—83), which brought no advantage to the Tsardom of Muscovy.^[24] Not only did it fail to bring about Muscovy’s desired advance into the Baltic region, but it also provoked an eastward movement on the part of the Kingdom of Poland, presenting Muscovy with a new and powerful competitor on the steppe frontier. In 1569 the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, enmeshed in the Livonian War with Mus­covy, resolved to strengthen its old tie with Poland and unite with it into a single state, the Commonwealth. The Union of Lublin (1569) created a new political framework that allowed the Kingdom of Poland to augment its old Ukrainian holdings, Galicia and western Podilia, with new ones— Volhynia and the Kyiv and Bratslav regions (previously part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania)—thereby becoming an active and influential pres­ence on the East European steppe frontier.^[25]

It should be noted that the relative ‘vacuum’ on the steppes attracted the attention not only of Muscovy and the Commonwealth, but of the Ottoman Empire as well.

The steppe expanses of southern Ukraine, known in the early modern period as the Wild Fields (dyke pole), were not fully controlled by any of the states bordering on them. In the times of Kyivan Rus’, this territory was traversed by organized bands of exiles and migrants of East Slavic origin who became known as brodnyky (from the verb brodyty, ‘to roam’). From the time of the Mongol invasion, the steppe became an area of no­madic wandering and foraging, subject to no official regulation, by bands of fishermen, hunters, and freebooters who began to be called ‘Cos­sacks’. The origin of this name, which means ‘freeman’ or ‘bandit’ in the Turkic languages, indicates the Tatar origin of the Cossack phenomenon. Nevertheless, beginning in the late fifteenth century, historical sources make ever more frequent reference to Slavic Cossacks rather than Turkic ones. The term ‘Cossacks’ was probably first used with reference to the Ruthenian population of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1492, in cor­respondence between the Crimean khan and the Lithuanian grand prince.

As may be judged from the sources for this period, there were at least two types of Ukrainian Cossackdom. One was a kind of steppe piracy, or ‘steppe sport’, as Mykhailo Hrushevsky called it. It involved armed Cos­sack bands, acting either under the leadership of local officials or against their will, which attacked traders and couriers traversing the steppe, as well as Tatar uluses and Turkish fortresses in the northern Black Sea re­gion. In the course of the sixteenth century, as periods of war and peace succeeded one another and foreign alliances were made and broken, Cos- sackdom became the characteristic mode of existence in this borderland, which was far removed from any center of state authority. It attracted banished noblemen, professional soldiers, and adventurers not only from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, but also from the Kingdom of Poland, the Tsardom of Muscovy, and other neighboring states.

Another type of Cossack activity, practiced by bands originating in the towns and small settlements of the upper Dnipro and its tributaries, also developed and became ever larger in scope. As a rule, these bands trav­eled down the Dnipro as far as the Rapids and the marshlands beyond them, where they engaged in fishing, hunting, or beekeeping. In winter they usually returned home or to the fortresses of the middle Dnipro, the best-known of which was Cherkasy. Here the local starostas (royal offi­cials in charge of castles and surrounding domains) taxed the Cossacks on their catch. As this was not to the Cossacks’ liking, they sought to avoid the starostas’ castles as much as possible, establishing their own de­fenses, known as horodky (small forts) or sichi (fortified camps), in the areas of their activity.

In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Polish and Lithuanian authorities found themselves obliged to deal not only with in­cessant Cossack conflicts with the Crimean Tatars and their campaigns into Moldavia but also with their Black Sea expeditions, in the course of which the Cossacks attacked Turkish ships and raided Turkish ports in the Crimea and the maritime territories of the Ottoman Empire, includ­ing the capital, Istanbul.^[29] On the one hand, these seagoing expeditions were a natural extension of the struggle waged on land, with the Tatars seizing captives and property and the Cossacks freeing the captives and robbing Tatar and Turkish caravans and towns. On the other hand, by launching seagoing expeditions, the Cossacks were taking part in the piracy that was then well developed in the Mediterranean basin. The Cossacks' existence beyond the pale of state jurisdiction, their active in­volvement in acts of robbery forbidden by officialdom, as well as the tol­eration and occasional approval of such actions by the local population associated them in some measure with the ‘social bandits' and pirates of Western and Southern Europe.⁹ The social organization of Cossack for­aging bands, as well as of later Cossack fortified camps on the lower Dnipro, with their elective leadership, independent judicial system, and severe military discipline, was reminiscent of the organization of pirate communities and associations.¹⁰ Piracy flourished in Western and South­ern Europe in the late sixteenth century, and the Cossacks of the Dnipro were well prepared to keep pace with the times.

While the Ukrainian Cossacks' only competitors on the Black Sea were their colleagues and frequent allies, the Don Cossacks,¹¹ the Mediter­ranean was a traditional arena of conflict between Christian and Muslim pirates. In the Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire protected the pirates of the Barbary Coast (the north African littoral), where the rule of the Turkish sultan had been established in the second half of the sixteenth century. Based in Algiers and other semi-autonomous ports that figured as city-states, the Muslim pirates raised high the flag of religious struggle, directing their attacks and raids almost exclusively against the ships and ports of the sultan's Christian opponents in Southern and Western Eur­ope. The activity of Catholic corsairs, supported by the Knights of Malta and the Tuscan Knights of St Stephen, also proceeded under the banner of religion, raised in this instance by Christians warding off the Muslim threat. Not surprisingly, Mediterranean piracy, which flourished during

and Dennis F. Essar (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), pp. 62-70. He also provides a drawing of a Cos­sack chaika. Significantly, one of the first references to the Ukrainian Cossacks in historical sources refers precisely to their expeditions down the Dnipro to the Black Sea. This is a report dating from 1510 about the plans of a Tatar khan to build a fortress between the Dnipro and Buh estuaries, as well as to span the Dnipro with chains in order to prevent Cossack expeditions to the Black Sea (details in Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus', 7: 82-6).

⁹ For the application of Eric Hobsbawm's views on ‘social banditry' to the history of Ukrain­ian Cossackdom, see Gordon, Cossack Rebellions, esp. pp. 65-7.

¹⁰ The best-known of these, Libertalia, arose in the eighteenth century and was also estab­lished on democratic principles, thereby constituting a challenge to neighboring polities gov­erned by autocratic rulers. See Marcus Rediker, ‘Libertalia: The Pirate's Utopia' in Pirates: Terror on the High Seas—from the Caribbean to the South China Sea, consulting ed.

¹¹ On joint seagoing expeditions by the Zaporozhian and Don Cossacks, see Viktor Brekhunenko, Stosunky ukrams’koho kozatstva z Donom u XVI—seredyni XVII st. (Kyiv and Zaporizhia, 1998), pp. 107-234.

periodic conflicts and wars between Christian Europe and the Islamic Ottoman Empire, established the military, political, and religious context within which contemporaries perceived the naval expeditions launched by Ukrainian Cossacks against Ottoman ships and domains on the Black Sea littoral.^[30]

West European authors of the seventeenth century actually drew cer­tain parallels between the Zaporozhian Cossacks and the Knights of Malta.^[31] Although the Zaporozhian Cossacks did not conduct Mediter­ranean expeditions, they were directly acquainted with the conflict be­tween Christian and Muslim corsairs in the region. Many Ukrainian captives sold in Crimean slave markets were imprisoned on Turkish gal­leys and Barbary Coast pirate ships. Several revolts of galley slaves on Turkish ships are known to have been led by Ukrainian Cossacks. The rebels generally sought the support of Christian rulers, and some of them eventually returned to their homelands. One of the best known of these revolts took place on a Turkish galley and was led by Ivan Sulyma, who later became a Cossack hetman. After the successful uprising, he was received by the pope and awarded a papal medal.^[32]

Who were the first Ukrainian Cossacks by ethnic and social origin? Some Western observers, especially the Commonwealth authorities, insisted on the multinational character of early Cossackdom. Rather typical in this regard was a statement by King Zygmunt III of Poland in a letter of 1615 to the sultan, in which he asserted that the Cossacks were an assem­bly of Muscovites, Wallachians, Magyars, Greeks, Tatars, and Turks (in another letter, he added Ruthenians and Moldavians as well).^[33] The problem with these and some other royal statements is that official Polish pronouncements on the national and political allegiance of the Dnipro Cossacks cannot be taken at face value. Royal declarations on the subject were usually made in response to Turkish accusations of the Common­wealth’s unwillingness to curb Cossackdom and were intended to con­vince the sultan’s court that the Cossacks were not subjects of the Polish king, but represented a variety of states and nationalities. The question, however, is not so much one of establishing the fact of the Cossacks’ multinational composition as of determining the proportion of represen­tatives of various countries and regions in the Cossack Host.

The earliest source pertinent to this question appears to be the register of the Cossack regiment that took part in the Livonian War in 1581. As many of the surnames and sobriquets of the Cossacks listed in the regis­ter have ‘territorial’ roots and indicate the places of origin of individual Cossacks, the register permits a partial reconstruction of the territorial and thus ethnic composition of the Dnipro Cossack Host of the day.¹⁶ Susanne Luber and Peter Rostankowski have managed to establish with reasonable certainty the origins of 356 of the 530 Cossacks whose names appear in the register. According to their calculations, 82 per cent of the ‘identified’ Cossacks came from Ukraine and Belarus, 8.4 per cent from Muscovy, 4.8 per cent from Poland, and 4.8 per cent from Lithuania. As for the Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) element in the Cossack regiment, 26.1 per cent came from Volhynia or Podilia, 22.8 per cent from the upper Dnipro region and Belarus, 17.4 per cent from the middle Dnipro region, and 15.7 per cent from the Prypiat basin.¹⁷ Mykhailo Hru- shevsky, who also studied the register, drew attention to the high per­centage of Cossacks from what is now Belarus and attempted to explain this by the advance of the Cossack regiment through Belarus on its way to the theater of operations, which apparently entailed recruitment on Belarusian territory.¹⁸

Italian...’ (see Habsburgs andZaporozhian Cossacks: The Diary of Erich Lassota von Steblau, 1594, ed. Lubomyr R. Wynar, trans. Orest Subtelny [Littleton, Colo., 1975], p. 117). On the ethnic composition of Cossack detachments, see also Vitalii Shcherbak, ‘Osobovyi ta etnichnyi sklad Zaporozhtsiv ta reiestrovykh’, Naukovi zapysky. Natsional'nyi universytet ‘Kyievo-Mohylians'ka akademiia", no. 3, Istoriia (Kyiv, 1998), pp. 75-80.

¹⁶ The ‘Register of Lower Dnipro Zaporozhian and River Cossacks Who Went to Moscow in the Service of His Royal Majesty the King’ was published in Zrodla dziejowe, 20: 154-64. One of the first attempts to establish the territorial origins of the Ukrainian Cossacks on the basis of this register was made by A. V. Storozhenko in his Stefan Batorii i dneprovskie kazaki: issledovanie, pamiatniki, dokumenty i zametki (Kyiv, 1904), pp. 18-20. For Hrushevsky’s calculations and interpretation, see his History of Ukraine-Rus', 7: 119-21.

¹⁷ Susanne Luber and Peter Rostankowski, ‘Die Herkunft der im Jahre 1581 registrierten Zaporoger Kosaken’, Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, n.s. 28 (1980): 368-90, here 377.

¹⁸ See Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus', 7: 120.

Although the particular circumstances of the Livonian War and mili­tary operations on Belarusian territory help to explain the predominance of references in contemporary sources to Belarusian centers of Cossack- dom, it is also necessary to note the special role of Belarusians in the making of Ukrainian Cossackdom. As may be judged from documentary references to Cossack units that took part in the first stage of the Livo­nian War, in the 1560s the principal centers of Cossackdom were located on the Left Bank of the Dnipro from Orsha to Oster and in the Prypiat River basin (Ukrainian and Belarusian Polisia and Volhynia).^[34] Since the middle and lower reaches of the Dnipro were effectively cut off from the remainder of Ukraine’s settled territory by the steppe, which was a dan­ger zone because of Tatar attacks, the Dnipro and its tributaries allowed the residents of Belarusian river settlements and adjoining territories to move southward with relative ease. At first they went to Kaniv and Cherkasy and then ventured further south to Zaporizhia. It is no accident that in a lustration of the Cherkasy castle (1552), residents of Mazyr, Petrykafi, and Bykhafi are mentioned as having obtained foraging rights along the Dnipro from the starosta of Cherkasy on equal terms with resi­dents of Kyiv and Chornobyl.^[35] Nor is it surprising that most of the Cos­sacks enlisted in the 1581 regiment also came from the basin of the Dnipro and its tributaries, the Prypiat (with its own tributaries, the Horyn and Sluch), Biarezina, and Sozh.^[36]

As for the social origins of the Cossacks, the first Ruthenians noted in late fifteenth-century sources as participants in the Cossack phenom­enon were burghers from Kyiv and Cherkasy. Later sources also frequently mention the participation of burghers, who are known to have consti­tuted a significant proportion of the Ukrainian border population. In the first half of the seventeenth century, approximately 60 per cent of this population lived in fortified towns, and the Kyiv palatinate alone ac­counted for about one-third of all Ukrainian towns. The composition of residents of the fortified border towns differed markedly, however, from that of the burgher population in the interior of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland. In the mid-sixteenth century, ap­proximately one-third of the population of Cherkasy was made up of burghers (223 persons), another third of the starosta’s retinue, civic servi­tors, and soldiers (253 in all), and the remaining third of Cossacks (250 individuals). There were a mere nine persons of princely, nobiliary, or boyar origin.^[37] In time, Cossacks actually increased as a proportion of the urban population. In 1600, there were 960 burghers and 1,300 Cossacks in Kaniv.^[38]

By the late sixteenth century, the peasantry was joining the Cossack ranks en masse. During the revolts that began to shake Ukraine in the 1590s, the Cossacks conducted lengthy campaigns throughout the ‘set­tled area’ (volost ’) all the way into Belarus, gladly accepting rebellious peasants as recruits. Peasants also came from long-settled interior re­gions to join the Cossacks and began to account for a larger proportion of residents of the steppe borderland. The peasants were driven into the un­tamed and dangerous steppe by the ‘second serfdom’ that was then be­ginning to develop on the territory of the united Polish-Lithuanian state.^[39] Apart from that, in an attempt to settle parcels of land granted on Ukrainian territory by Polish kings, the nobility brought in peasants, at­tracting them with promises of temporary exemption from taxes in the new tax-free settlements (slobody). When the period of exemption ended, the peasants would often move further into the steppe, establishing new tax-free villages. This advancing frontier in eastern Ukraine, like every such frontier from Siberia to North America, brought with it a weakening of official control, opened new economic possibilities, and promoted spe­cific forms of social organization.^[40]

According to historiographic tradition, the first leaders of Cossackdom were border starostas, that is, state servitors of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Among those who figure most prominently in this tradition are Ostafii Dashkovych, Przeclaw Lanckoronski, Bernard Pretwicz,²⁶ and, most particularly, Dmytro Vyshnevetsky. The latter’s activity is an interesting example of the close association between the local border ad­ministration and Cossackdom, as well as of the semi-legal nature of that association in the eyes of the government. Vyshnevetsky acted alternately as starosta of Cherkasy and Kaniv under the jurisdiction of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and as a volunteer seeking to enter the service of the Muscovite tsar or the Turkish sultan. In the 1560s he built a castle on the island of Khortytsia beyond the Dnipro Rapids that served for a time as a Cossack outpost in the struggle against the Tatars. As Grand Prince Zygmunt August represented the castle’s functions in a letter of 1557 to Vyshnevetsky, it was intended to prevent the penetration of the region by the Muscovite state and to keep the Cossacks from harassing Tatar herds­men and damaging their uluses.²⁷

Vyshnevetsky’s struggle with the Tatars, as well as his martyr’s death in Istanbul in 1563 (after the failure of his campaign against Moldavia), helped to make this Cossack prince a popular hero. Many researchers have seen him as the model of the Cossack Baida, who was celebrated in Ukrainian epic songs (dumas). He also became a hero of Ukrainian na­tional historiography as the founder of the Khortytsia castle, the proto­type of the Zaporozhian Sich. Vyshnevetsky’s activities in the Dnipro

no. 4 (1913): 352-76; A. I. Baranovich (O. I. Baranovych), ‘Naselenie predstepnoi Ukrainy v XVI v.’, Istoricheskie zapiski 32 (1950): 198—232; id., Ukraina nakanune osvoboditel’noi voiny seredinyXVIIveka (Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskiepredposylkivoiny) (Moscow, 1959); O. S. Kompan, ‘Do pytannia pro zaselenist’ Ukrainy v XVII st.’, UIZh, no. 1 (1960): 65—77; Zenon Guldon, ‘Badania nad zaludnieniem Ukrainy w XVII wieku’, Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej 13 (1965): 561—6; M. H. Krykun, ‘Naselennia podil’s’koho voievodtsva v pershii polovyni XVII st.’ in Ukra'ins’kyiistoryko-heohrafichnyizbirnyk (Kyiv), no. 1, ed. I. O. Hurzhii et al. (1971): 115—35; id., ‘Dokumenty TsDIA URSR u m. Kyievi iak dzherelo do vyvchennia mihratsii' naselennia na Ukraini u pershii polovyni XVII st.’, Arkhivy Ukrainy, no. 5 (1985): 49—57.

On the Ukrainian peasantry, see Kryp”iakevych, Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi, 2nd edn., pp. 18—26; I. D. Boiko, Selianstvo Ukrainy v druhiipolovyniXVI—pershiipolovyniXVIIst. (Kyiv, 1963).

²⁶ On Dashkovych, see the studies by Bohdan Buchyns’kyi, ‘Pochatky politychnoi kar”iery Ostafiia Dashkovycha’, ZNTSh 113 (1913): 23—43; Wladyslaw Pociecha, ‘Daszkiewicz (Daszkowicz), Eustachy (Ostafij)’ in Polski slownik biograficzny, ed. Wladyslaw Konopczynski (Cracow and Wroclaw, 1935ff.), vol. 4 (1938): 444—7, and V”iacheslav Seniutovych-Berezhnyi, ‘Ostap Dashkovych (Dashkevych)—vozhd’ kozats’kyi’, Ukra'ins’kyi istoryk 6, nos. 1—3 (1969): 118—26. On Lanckoronski, see Henryk Kotarski, ‘Lanckoronski Przeclaw (Krzeslaw)’ in Polski slownik biograficzny, vol. 16 (1971): 449—50. On Pretwicz, see Andrzej Tomczak, ‘Pretwicz (Pretfic) Bernard’ in Polski slownik biograficzny, vol. 28 (1984—5): 433—5; id., ‘Memorial Bernarda Pretwicza do krola z 1550 r.’, Studia i Materialy do Historii Wojskowosci 6, no. 2 (1960): 328—57.

²⁷ See Shcherbak, Formuvannia kozats’koho stanu, pp. 36—8. In 1557, after two assaults, the castle was taken by the khan’s forces, and Vyshnevetsky had to withdraw northward along the Dnipro with his Cossacks.

basin, which spanned a gray area between loyal service to the grand prince and leadership of steppe brigandage, make it possible to regard his castle as a foreshadowing not only of the Sich, but also of the fortress built above the Rapids at Kodak in 1635 as a Polish outpost to maintain control over Cossack activity.^[41]

From the beginnings of Ukrainian Cossackdom, princes such as Dmytro Vyshnevetsky were its first patrons as well as its earliest antag­onists. The princes Hlynsky, Vyshnevetsky, Ostrozky, and Ruzhynsky, who controlled the offices of palatine and starosta in steppe Ukraine, or­ganized and maintained Cossack units to defend the border and conduct campaigns against the Tatars, but imposed taxes on those same Cossacks and punished them for land and sea expeditions against the Crimea and other Ottoman dominions. With the nobiliary colonization of the Wild Fields, more and more representatives of the nobility and the boyars looked to the steppe for land grants and improvement of their economic and social status. As mass colonization of the Dnipro region and Podilia proceeded in the late sixteenth century, it was precisely the princely fam­ilies (above all the Ostrozkys, Vyshnevetskys, and Ruzhynskys), and later Polish nobiliary clans (especially the Zolkiewskis, Kalinowskis, Potockis, Koniecpolskis, and Laszczes), who managed to accumulate the greatest latifundias, often driving out their initial assistants, the Cossackized no­bility and Cossack officers.^[42]

If the conditions of the Cossacks' everyday economic and military life were largely determined by their relations with local starostas and mag­nates, their social status depended above all on their relations with the central government and the success or failure of negotiations at the time of their recruitment for state service by the royal administration. The idea of employing the Cossacks as state servitors on the uncertain south-eastern border of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was first proposed as early as the 1520s.^[43] Documented attempts to enlist them, as well as to endow them with specific rights and freedoms, date from several decades later—the 1560s and 1570s. Beginning in 1561, Cossacks were actively re­cruited for the Livonian War with Muscovy by order of Grand Prince Zygmunt August. Local officials entered their names in ‘registers’ and is­sued pay for services from the state treasury. Payment ceased, however, with the end of the military campaign.^[44]

In 1568, on the eve of the Union of Lublin between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Zygmunt August decided to create a standing Cossack army. He issued a special proclamation to the Cossacks forbidding them to provoke subjects of the Turkish sultan and calling on them to abandon the lower Dnipro for border castles, where they would be taken into service.^[45] Judging by a later royal proclamation of June 1572, a Cossack unit was eventually recruited. It was headed by the Polish nobleman Jan Badowski, who was not only to command the unit but also to administer justice to the enlisted Cossacks. Badowski himself and his unit were exempt from the jurisdiction of the local ad­ministration (except in the event of ‘violence and bloody deeds’) and were directly subordinate to Crown Field Hetman Jerzy Jaziowiecki. Sep­arate jurisdiction was an important feature of the new Cossack register, as was its durability: in 1575 and 1576, there was still a unit of 300 Cos­sacks in the royal service receiving payment from the state treasury.^[46]

In 1578, the new king of Poland, Stefan Batory, recruited a new unit, now numbering 500 Cossacks, to take the place of the old one, which had evidently disintegrated because of the non-payment of wages. This unit was to serve in the Livonian War, for which the Cossacks were to receive a higher wage; after the war, they were to revert to regular pay, as in the times of Zygmunt August. Batory’s proclamation, which established the principles on which the new register was to be drawn up, somewhat re­duced the status of the Cossack unit. It was no longer subordinate to the Crown hetman but to the starosta of Kaniv and Cherkasy, Mykhailo Vyshnevetsky. Nevertheless, the proclamation increased the size of the unit and established continuity between the old and new registers, as well as consistency in the official policy of assigning wages for the Cossacks and exempting them from the jurisdiction of the local authorities. In 1582, in response to Cossack complaints about restrictions on their rights, Batory issued a proclamation to border palatines and officials

confirming that the Cossacks were under separate jurisdiction and for­bidding the imposition of taxes or death duties upon them, thereby as­serting the right of the Cossacks to pass on their property by inheritance. This proclamation later became the basis of Cossack claims to their particular rights and freedoms.^[47]

In recruiting Cossacks for state service and exempting those enrolled in the register from taxes and other obligations, Zygmunt August and Stefan Batory were doing nothing unusual by the standards of the time. Many European rulers of the day were creating militias to defend their borders and fight neighboring powers. In 1533, an armed militia was re­cruited from the local population in Urbino, in 1560 in Ferrara, in 1566 in Piedmont, and in 1588 in England (where the most battle-ready units were specially trained and separated from the others in 1573). In Croatia, which bordered on the Ottoman Empire, as did Ukraine, a reform of the granicari (military border settlers) was carried out in 1578, and the border strip became a separate military administrative unit. Peasants and burghers recruited for military service were usually exempt from taxation and particular labor obligations; they also acquired certain privileges with respect to the administration of justice.^[48]

The rulers’ decision to arm their subjects was not, however, free of controversy. This policy aroused heated debate in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. There was, first of all, the danger of revolt on the part of armed militias. Although Justus Lipsius wrote that only tyrants had reason to fear their own people, while Giovanni Botero called on rulers to provide military training for their subjects, such advice was greeted with skepticism by the rulers themselves. In the German lands, for example, the first armed militias were established only in the last two decades of the sixteenth century for fear of revolt by an armed peasantry. It was generally considered that militias could be rather effective in de­fending their native lands from enemy attack, but that they would be un­reliable in military operations in foreign lands or at an appreciable distance from their home territory. As for police functions, which the militias were also expected to fulfill, their loyalty to the ruler depended on the extent to which they shared the aims and convictions of those engaged in rebellion or revolt. Thus the militias gave their first loyalty to their own communities and properties; only then could they be counted upon by one ruler or another.^[49]

The formation and activity of various European militias has a good deal in common with the history of the Cossack register and Cossack- dom’s relations with the Commonwealth authorities. At the same time, there were significant differences between the militias of West European rulers and the Cossack units recruited into the service of the Polish kings. One of the most significant is that in the latter half of the sixteenth cen­tury, when the first registers were drawn up, the grand prince of Lithu­ania and, subsequently, the king of Poland did not require special Cossack detachments for the defense of their south-eastern borders. Conditions in the dangerous border area, where a Tatar raid could be expected at any moment, were such that the whole population was under arms; when danger struck, it mobilized in the defense of the border castles.^[50] Iron­ically, the Cossack register was first established not to oppose Tatar at­tacks with Cossack might but to curb the Cossacks and stop them from provoking the Tatars and Turks, with whom Zygmunt August and Stefan Batory wished to maintain peaceful relations.

In recruiting Cossacks for state service and ordering them out of the lower Dnipro region, Zygmunt August was merely reacting to the de­mands of the Turkish sultan to put an end to Cossack harassment of the Tatar population. Batory was also largely responding to the sultan’s threats in connection with Cossack campaigns against the Tatars and Moldavia. By renewing the Cossack register established by his predeces­sor, Batory in effect carried out the plan recommended to him by the Crimean khan, who advised that he take the best of the Cossacks into the royal service and punish the rest. Pursuant to this advice, one aspect of the king’s strategy for curbing the Cossacks consisted of taking into his employ the registered Cossacks who had been recruited for the Livonian War, which removed the most battle-ready Cossack element from the steppe borderland. Furthermore, in 1578, the leader of a Cossack cam­paign against Ottoman-controlled Moldavia, Ivan Pidkova, was exe­cuted, and a punitive expedition organized by Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky was sent to the lower Dnipro region.^[51] Thus, unlike militias in other European lands, the Cossack ‘militia’ was recruited not in order to defend the borderland from an external enemy but to avoid diplomatic and military conflict with the enemy.

The growth of the Cossacks’ military significance in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and the success of their struggle with the Tatars were due at least in part to the military revolution that swept Europe in the early modern period. In the first decades of the sixteenth century, the large-scale adoption of firearms increased the importance of the infantry. Infantrymen armed with muskets gradually displaced the nobiliary (gentry) cavalry, the traditionally small medieval armies began to increase rapidly with the addition of infantrymen, and European rulers required ever greater numbers of infantry musketeers. This revolution in the art of war in­creased the significance of militias in Western Europe and enhanced the role of the Ukrainian Cossacks in Commonwealth military campaigns of the early seventeenth century. As infantrymen bearing firearms displaced mounted warriors armed with swords, lances, or bows, the Ukrainian Cossacks, who were predominantly infantrymen, became more successful in their struggle with the steppe nomads and the Crimean Tatars, who fought mainly on horseback. The use of gunpowder should therefore be regarded as one of the major preconditions for the colonization of the Ukrainian steppe and the growing power of Ukrainian Cossackdom.^[52]

Among other reasons for the growth of the Cossack phenomenon, one should note the specific policy of the Commonwealth government with respect to the defense and administration of the steppe borderland. To defend this territory, the government at first relied mainly on the stand­ing army, initially established in 1562 for the defense of Galicia and Podilia and supported by one-fourth (kwarta) of the revenues from the royal domains, as well as on diplomatic measures to maintain peace with the Crimea and the Ottomans. As a rule, the Polish cavalry was more ef­fective than the Cossack infantry in checking Tatar attacks. Nevertheless, given the small size of Poland’s standing army, the Cossacks automat­ically became the major protagonists in steppe warfare with the nomads. Given the Polish nobility’s ever-increasing tendency to deny the king funds for military campaigns and to ignore his appeals for participation in levies en masse, the royal administration never managed to develop an ef­fective defense system that could dispense with Cossack participation.^[53] Even so, throughout most of the sixteenth century, the authorities sought not so much to deploy the Cossacks for border defense as to curb and neutralize Cossack zeal in the struggle with the Tatars.

The consequences of this border policy on the part of the Common­wealth authorities become particularly apparent when one compares it with the attitude of the Muscovite government to the defense of its steppe frontier. Here the border problem traditionally attracted special attention from governing circles, which found it necessary to mobilize extensive human and material resources for border defense and had the capacity to do so. The system of castles and fortifications that became known as the defensive line (zasechnaia cherta) not only helped to prevent Tatar attacks on Muscovy from the steppe but also entailed a special role for the gov­ernment in promoting Muscovite expansion to the south and east. The Russian Cossacks were part of this process, but owing to the state’s lead­ing role in the defense and colonization of the steppe areas, they remained a rather marginal borderland phenomenon as compared with their com­rades on the Dnipro.⁴¹ The particular features of the Commonwealth’s political organization and the relative weakness of its military machine were thus among the important factors that turned Ukrainian Cossack- dom into the most dynamic force on the ‘great frontier’.

From Cossack Register to Corporate Estate

For the most part, the Cossack army proved relatively inexpensive to the state treasury, but the price that the whole Commonwealth had to pay for the services of this army, both in the international arena (where it was

(1960): 349-98; Marek Plewczynski, ‘Udzial jazdy obrony potocznej w walkach na poludniowo- wschodnim pograniczu Rzeczypospolitej w latach 1531-1573’, Studia i Materialy do Historii Wojskowosci 26 (1983): 111—42. On the kwarta, see Encyklopedia staropolska ilustrowana, ed. Zygmunt Gloger, 4 vols. (Warsaw, 1900—3; repr. Warsaw, 1972), 3: 127—8.

On the defense system, see the following works: O. S. Hrushevs’kyi, ‘Pytannia oborony zamkiv V. Kn. Lytovs’koho v XVI v.’, Zbirnyk Istorychnofilolohichnoho viddilu VUAN46 (1928): 1—9; Ievfym Sichyns’kyi, ‘Oboronni zamky zakhidn’oho Podillia XIV-XVII st. Istorychno- arkheolohichni narysy’, Zapysky Istorychnofilolohichnoho viddilu VUAN 17 (1928): 64—160; O. Mal’chenko, ‘Typolohiia zamkovykh ta mis’kykh fortyfikatsiinykh system na pivdenno- skhidnomu ukrai'ns’komu porubizhzhi (kinets’ XIV—seredyna XVII st.)’ in Naukovi zapysky. Zbirnyk prats' molodykh vchenykh ta aspirantiv, no. 1 (Kyiv, 1996), pp. 5—23; id., ‘Oboronna systema Podillia, Bratslavshchyny, Kyivshchyny ochyma suchasnykiv (XV-XVIII st.): ohliad naratyvnykh dzherel’, ibid., pp. 24—48.

⁴¹ On Muscovite defenses in the steppe borderland in the early modern period, see A. A. Novosel’skii, Bor'ba Moskovskogo gosudarstva s tatarami v pervoi polovine XVII veka (Moscow and Leningrad, 1948); V. V. Kargalov, Na stepnoi granitse: oborona ‘krymskoi ukrainy' Moskovskogo gosudarstva (Moscow, 1974); Carol Belkin Stevens, Soldiers on the Steppe: Army Re­form and Social Change in Early Modern Russia (DeKalb, Ill., 1995). On the Russian Cossacks, see A. L. Stanislavskii, Grazhdanskaia voina v Rossii: kazachestvo naperelome istorii (Moscow, 1990); N. A. Minenkov, Donskoe kazachestvo na zare svoei istorii (Rostov-na-Donu, 1992). always necessary to guard against Cossack actions capable of provoking a war) and at home (given the damage caused by Cossack revolts), consid­erably exceeded the savings realized by the treasury.

The second half of the 1580s was marked by the growth of Cossack campaigns on land and sea against the dominions of the Ottoman Em­pire, drawing a sharply negative reaction from Istanbul, which began to threaten the Commonwealth with a major war. In an atmosphere of growing danger from the Turks, the Commonwealth Diet adopted a spe­cial resolution concerning the Cossacks of the lower Dnipro and Ukraine in 1590, and in the following year the king introduced an ordinance (ordynacja) that established new conditions of Cossack service. It pro­vided for a Cossack force of a thousand men to be maintained in the steppe, beyond the settled area, not only to protect the borders against Tatar expeditions but also to prevent the remaining Cossacks from under­taking expeditions against Ottoman domains. A castle was to be built on the middle Dnipro for this Cossack detachment, but because the Turkish danger passed temporarily and the treasury lacked funds to pay the wages of the registered Cossacks, the ordinance of 1591 remained mainly a statement of intent. Cossackdom, however, required the gov­ernment’s continued attention, and soon its activity turned from the state’s outer limits to its interior.^[54]

Having increased in numbers and military significance, the Cossack Host decided to settle accounts at home, primarily with its godfathers, the Ukrainian princes. They were developing large landholdings in Ukraine and forcibly annexing to them not only Cossack foraging grounds but also royal land grants to the petty nobility. One of the nobles wronged in this way was the Cossack leader Kryshtof Kosynsky, whose holdings, recently granted by the king, were claimed by the Ostrozky family. Toward the end of 1591, Kosynsky led a Cossack revolt that began with an attack on Bila Tserkva, the residence of the local starosta, Janusz Ostrogski (Ianush Ostrozky). Soon the rebels took over the largest fortresses in the region, including the town of Pereiaslav on the Left Bank of the Dnipro. They seized the artillery in the castles and forced the local population to swear allegiance to the Cossack hetman. Kosynsky’s at­tempts to extend the revolt westward, especially his foray into Volhynia, led the local nobility to mobilize under the leadership of Janusz Ostrogski and his father, Kostiantyn. In February 1593, rebel units were defeated by the forces of the Ostrozkys near the small town of Piatka, and Kosynsky had to retreat to Zaporizhia. In May of the same year, a new army raised by Kosynsky was defeated by Prince Oleksander Vyshnevetsky at Cherkasy, while the rebel leader himself perished under mysterious circumstances.⁴³

A characteristic trait of Kosynsky’s uprising was the royal court’s avoidance of intervention in the conflict between the Cossacks and the prince-magnates. The latter also invested little hope in the central au­thorities: after the Battle of Piatka, for example, Kosynsky was given a letter to sign in which he apologized on behalf of the Cossacks not to the king or the Commonwealth, as one might expect, but to Kostiantyn Ostrozky in person. Similarly, after the Battle of Cherkasy, Oleksander Vyshnevetsky consented to a rather liberal settlement with the Cossacks, even though the resolutions of the Diet of 1593 amounted to a call for their extermination.

The peasant masses, partly spurred to participation in the revolt by the famine of 1591—2, became an important source of recruits for Kosynsky’s forces. Peasants and burghers also played a considerable role in the next Cossack uprising, which was led by Severyn (Semerii) Nalyvaiko and lasted from 1594 to 1596. To some extent, one may speak of the existence of two quite separate movements in this period: one headed by Nalyvaiko, in which the leading role was played by Cossackized burghers and peas­ants; and another under the leadership of Hryhorii Loboda and Matvii Shaula, in which pride of place went to the old Cossacks of the lower Dnipro. There was no clear plan of action, and the rebels alternated cam­paigns against Moldavia and Hungary with pillage deep in the settled area, including the Kyiv region, Podilia, Volhynia, and Belarus. Some of these actions took place with the joint participation of Nalyvaiko’s men and the Zaporozhians, while other campaigns were undertaken independ­ently. Friction and disagreement between the two groups, which had existed from the outset, became especially acute in the camp on the Solonytsia River, where the rebels were surrounded in May 1596 by forces under the command of Crown Field Hetman Stanislaw Zolkiewski. At first Nalyvaiko’s men took the upper hand, and their op­ponent, Loboda, was executed by order of the Cossack council. Subse­quently, however, the ‘old’ Cossacks took their revenge by agreeing to Zolkiewski’s demand that the leaders of the uprising, including Nalyvaiko and Shaula, be handed over. Nalyvaiko’s men attempted to defend their leader, but he was seized, surrendered to Zolkiewski, and executed in Warsaw the following year.⁴⁴

⁴³ On the course of the uprising, see Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus', 7: 139—50; Gordon, Cossack Rebellions, pp. 99—142; Serhii Lep”iavko, Kozats'ki viiny kintsia XVI st. v Ukraini (Chernihiv, 1996), pp. 45—92.

⁴⁴ On the course of the Nalyvaiko revolt, see Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus', 7: 155—80; Gordon, Cossack Rebellions, pp. 143—204; Lep”iavko, Kozats'ki viiny, pp. 93—224. For a survey of source publications and secondary literature on the Cossack wars of the 1590s, see the biblio­graphic note with my supplement in Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus', 7: 458—61.

The Nalyvaiko and Kosynsky uprisings led to the loss of the special rights and privileges previously conferred on the registered Cossacks, but the loss proved temporary. The military and political situation in which the Commonwealth found itself at the beginning of the seventeenth cen­tury favored a rapprochement between the Cossacks and the central authorities, which meant a ‘rehabilitation’ of Cossackdom and the restoration of some of its rights and privileges. A need for additional mili­tary contingents was created first by Commonwealth intervention in Moldavian affairs and then by the new war in the Baltic region, and the Cossacks were glad to be of service to the Warsaw government. These campaigns were followed by the Time of Troubles in Muscovy, in which the Ukrainian Cossacks played an even more important role. Cossack contingents also proved useful in 1618 during Royal Prince Wladyslaw’s campaign against Moscow.^[55]

The growth of Cossackdom was not, however, an unalloyed foreign- policy benefit to the Commonwealth, for it also created significant prob­lems in the international arena. Frequent Cossack attacks on the Crimea and the Black Sea littoral of Turkey (including surprise assaults on Istan­bul in 1615 and 1620) led to a worsening of Commonwealth relations with the Ottomans and forced the Polish-Lithuanian government to seek ways of curbing the unruly Cossacks. This was the prime objective of the offi­cial commissions that negotiated with the Cossacks in 1614, 1617 and 1619. Their efforts proved unsuccessful, and an Ottoman-Polish war broke out in 1620, largely as a result of Cossack seagoing expeditions.^[56] The war began badly for the Commonwealth with a devastating defeat at TTutora in the autumn of 1620. In the following year, at Khotyn, Commonwealth forces managed to turn the tide of the conflict by defeat­ing an army led by the Turkish sultan Osman II. The victory was due in no small measure to the successful mobilization of Cossack forces. The Cossacks managed to field an army of almost 40,000 men under the com­mand of Hetman Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny that decided the outcome of the campaign.^[57]

Having grown in strength in the wars with Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire and proved their usefulness to the state, the Ukrainian Cossacks now demanded new privileges and concessions from the authorities. They also continued to intervene in foreign conflicts. In the first half of the 1620s, the Cossacks became actively involved in Crimean affairs, backing one pretender to the khan’s throne against another. Nor did they cease their expeditions on the Black Sea, which damaged the Common­wealth’s relations with the Ottomans and gave rise to the threat of another large conflict with Istanbul.^[58] Not until 1625 was the Polish-Lithuanian government finally able to begin putting a curb on the Cossacks. Armed encounters took place between Polish and Cossack forces in the Dnipro region, and after several clashes near Lake Kurukove, they signed an agreement that left many Cossacks dissatisfied, but still greatly expanded the Cossack rights and privileges recognized by the central government and increased the Cossack register to 6,000 men.^[59]

On the basis of the Kurukove agreement, Hetman Mykhailo Doroshenko divided the Cossack Host into six regiments, designating regimental towns and territories for them. After Kurukove, the Cossack presence in the settled area took on definite organizational forms; in some measure, it institutionalized the differences and disparities already ap­parent by that time between the registered Cossacks in the settled area and the Zaporozhians of the lower Dnipro. During the Nalyvaiko upris­ing, it was the Zaporozhians who had represented the conservative aspect of Cossackdom, rather favorably inclined to the government, while the settled area had been the hotbed of the most radical stratum—new re­cruits to Cossackdom from the towns and villages. In the 1620s, by con­trast, the settled area became the abode of the more established and comparatively prosperous Cossacks, while Zaporizhia turned into the base of the poor Cossacks and a center of social protest. One of the rea­sons for this change was the successful colonization of the Dnipro region in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, which allowed Cos­sacks already established on the middle Dnipro to turn their previous for­aging areas into lucrative properties, while burghers and peasants newly arrived from the interior of Ukraine and Belarus had to go far beyond the Rapids to ply the Cossack trade.

Friction between the town Cossacks and the Zaporozhians became ap­parent during the hetmancies of Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny and Mykhailo Doroshenko, who had to compete for the hetman’s mace with candidates from the Zaporozhian rank and file. These differences grew especially acute during the Cossack uprising of 1630. On the eve of the revolt, a crisis of dual power emerged among the Cossacks: Taras Fedorovych became hetman in Zaporizhia, while Hryhorii Chorny held the same office in the settled area. The government recognized and sup­ported Chorny, who took action against those Cossacks who opposed the authorities and found refuge beyond the Rapids, striking them from the register. The Zaporozhians responded with a foray into the settled area, where they captured Chorny and executed him. Soon the uprising spread to the Korsun, Kaniv, and Pereiaslav regions. The local population sup­ported the rebels, not least because of the government’s decision to billet Polish soldiers in Ukraine, while the registered Cossacks vacillated be­tween the government and the rebels. At first, some 3,000 registered Cossacks joined the Crown army, but later, during the Battle of Korsun, most of them went over to the Zaporozhians, leaving only an insignificant remnant with the Polish army commanded by Stanislaw Koniecpolski. After protracted engagements between Polish and Cossack forces, a treaty that amounted to a de facto Cossack victory was signed at Pereiaslav in May 1630, increasing the register to 8,000 men.^[60]

The treaty did not, however, put an end to discontent among the Cos­sacks. This was best indicated by the subsequent actions of Fedorovych, who remained dissatisfied with the conditions of the compromise and set off for Zaporizhia, and then for the Don, at the head of a detachment of Zaporozhians. Although Cossack participation in the Commonwealth’s wars with Muscovy (1632) and Sweden (1635) provided something of an outlet for their energy, the inability of the state treasury to pay for their services was a constant source of discontent in the Cossack milieu. The construction of a Polish fortress above the Rapids at Kodak (1635), which blocked the Dnipro route to the Black Sea, increased that discontent even more. An early warning of the coming storm was a Cossack attack on Kodak, which was seized and destroyed by a detachment led by Ivan Sulyma. The registered Cossack officers, seeking to maintain peace with the government, handed over Sulyma, who was executed in Warsaw after a trial at the Diet, but that did not prevent the outbreak of another Cossack war in 1637.⁵¹

The new revolt also began in Zaporizhia, where the unruly Cossacks were headed by Pavlo But (Pavliuk), who had led an expedition to the Crimea not long before. At first his agitation in the settled area proved extraordinarily effective: the registered Cossacks arrested their hetman and chancellor and handed them over to the rebels for execution. But the for­tunes of war soon turned against the rebels. After an unsuccessful battle at Kumeiky, the Cossacks had to submit to Crown Field Hetman Mikoiaj Potocki, who appointed a new hetman for the registered Cossacks. Meanwhile, Zaporizhia remained in rebel hands. In 1638, it was the source of a new Cossack revolt headed by Iakiv Ostrianytsia and Dmytro Hunia, and once again it ended in a Cossack defeat. Cornered by Potocki at a camp on the Starets River, the Cossacks had to accept the burden­some conditions of a new agreement with the Commonwealth. The ordin­ance of 1638 reduced the Cossack register to 6,000 and placed it under strict Polish control: the commissioner who headed the registered army and all the colonels were now to be appointed by the king from among the Polish nobility. The fortress at Kodak was rebuilt in 1639, and for ten long years, until the outbreak of the uprising led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1648, the so-called ‘golden peace’ held sway in Ukraine. It seemed that the Commonwealth authorities had finally succeeded in bringing the re­calcitrant Cossacks to heel.⁵²

⁵¹ On Cossack participation in Commonwealth wars of the first half of the 1630s, see Hru- shevs’kyi, Istoriia Ukratny-Rusy, vol. 8, pt. 1, pp. 201-19; Oleh Tselevych, ‘Uchast’ kozakiv v Smolens’kii viini 1633-4 rr.’, ZNTSh 28 (1899): 1-72; B. N. Floria, ‘Nachalo Smolenskoi voiny i zaporozhskoe kazachestvo’ in Mappa Mundi, pp. 443-50. On the history of Kodak, see Alek­sander Czolowski, Kudak, przyczynki do zalozenia i upadku twierdzy (Lviv, 1926).

⁵² On the Cossack revolt of 1637-8, see Hrushevs’kyi, Istoriia Ukratny-Rusy, vol. 8, pt. 1, pp. 258-317; Wladyslaw Tomkiewicz, ‘Ograniczenie swobod kozackich w roku 1638’, Kwartalnik Even though the registered Cossacks were indeed brought under the con­trol of the central administration after the failed uprisings of 1637—8, by the end of the 1630s Cossackdom had been largely transformed into a corporate estate with its own particular rights and privileges that had to be acknowledged and maintained even in the ordinance of 1638. How did this happen? An analysis of the Cossack demands advanced in the course of their uprisings and negotiations with the government commissioners in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries makes possible a par­tial reconstruction of the process whereby the Cossacks came to regard themselves as a separate order and negotiated (in the postmodern sense of the term) their entry into the social structure of the Commonwealth. By the same token, Polish responses to these demands and official at­tempts to ‘regulate’ the Cossack question give a good idea of the extent to which the Commonwealth government was prepared to accept or reject Cossackdom as a corporate estate at any particular time.

Regardless of the multiformity and variability of Cossack relations with the authorities, there was a large measure of inner continuity between the problems raised and discussed in negotiations between the two sides, which may be provisionally divided into three general categories. The first consisted of questions pertaining to the Cossacks as unruly privat­eers and hired soldiers in the service of the Commonwealth. The second and, significantly, much larger category consisted of problems associated with the Cossacks as a new corporate estate that was just coming into ex­istence within the traditional social structure of the Polish-Lithuanian state. Questions of a religious and national character made up the third category of problems put forward and discussed in the course of Cos- sackdom’s relations with the government. Here we shall consider only the first two categories, as problems of religion, culture, and nationality will be discussed in separate chapters below.⁵³

Historyczny 44 (1930): 125—75; id., ‘Bitwa pod Kumejkami (16.XII.1637)’, PrzeglqdHistoryczno- Wojskowy 9 (1937): 239—61; V. E. Shutoi, ‘Kanun osvoboditel’noi voiny ukrainskogo naroda 1648—54 gg.: krest’iansko-kazatskoe vosstanie na Ukraine 1637—38 gg.’, Istoricheskie zapiski 46 (1954): 23—77; Guslistyi, ‘Krest’iansko-kazatskie vosstaniia’, pp. 69—76; Golobutskii, Zaporozh- skoe kazachestvo, pp. 222—49.

⁵³ A detailed account of these relations is given in the appropriate chapters of Hrushevs’kyi’s Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy, vols. 7 and 8. The following account of Cossack demands and of their ne­gotiations with the Commonwealth authorities is based on the historical studies and sources cited below.

A general survey of the complicated relations between the Polish-Lithuanian Common­wealth and the Ukrainian Cossacks in the first two decades of the seventeenth century is given by Wladyslaw Serczyk, ‘The Commonwealth and the Cossacks in the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century’, HUS 2, no. 1 (March 1978): 73—93. The text of the ordinance of 1591 is published in AIuZR (1863): pt. 3, vol. 1, no. 11. For the text of the Cossack agreement with Oleksander Vyshnevetsky, as cited in a letter from Jozef Wereszczynski to Janusz Zamoyski, see A. V. Storozhenko, Stefan Batorii, pp. 307—9. The documents of the commission of 1614 are reproduced in Zherela 8 (1908), nos. 107, 108; AIuZR (1863): pt. 3, vol. 1, no. 58; those of the

Let us begin with questions pertaining to the first of the above­mentioned categories. One of the leitmotifs of Cossack negotiations with the government throughout the period under discussion was the problem of Cossack seagoing expeditions. Their campaigns against Turkish domin­ions on the Black Sea littoral and land-based expeditions against the Crimea, Moldavia, and Wallachia created problems for the Common­wealth similar to those afflicting West European states of the period in their relations with privateer armadas. Such forces took part in naval ac­tion on the Mediterranean or on the Atlantic on the side of their king, but upon the conclusion of peace, they would refuse to give up the armed ag­gression that brought them profits and sustained their way of life.⁵⁴ Al­most every Diet constitution on the Cossack question stressed the need to stop unsanctioned Cossack campaigns against neighboring states. The Diet of 1590 and the government ordinance adopted as a result of its deci­sions in 1591 attempted to put an end to Cossack aggression against the Turks and Tatars. In 1614, the royal commissioners again demanded that the Cossacks cease attacking the Commonwealth’s neighbors; the de­mand was repeated by the commissions of 1617 and 1619.

At Khotyn, having rendered the Poles a very considerable military ser­vice, the Cossacks asked for the right to hire themselves out to other Christian rulers as well. The Kurukove agreement of 1625, however, not only prohibited seagoing expeditions and alliances with other states but also called for the burning of Cossack boats and forbade the construction of new ones.⁵⁵ Prohibitions on sea campaigns against Turkish possessions often proved dangerous for the interior regions of the Commonwealth, to which the Cossacks would repair in search of ‘billets and quarters’. Such expeditions would end with the Cossacks not only robbing the local gen­try and the burgher elite, but also rousing the poor townspeople and peas­ants to revolt. Then the officials would hasten to remind the Cossacks that their obligation was to make war on the infidels, not on their own country, and such appeals would close the vicious circle of Common­wealth policy toward the Cossacks.

commission of 1617 in AIuZR (1863): pt. 3, vol. 1, no. 41; Pisma Stanislawa Zolkiewskiego, ed. August Bielowski (Lviv, 1861), pp. 311-22, 515-18; those of the commission of 1619, ibid., pp. 330, 334, 362-3. The texts of the Cossack petition drawn up at Khotyn in 1621 and of the instructions to the Commonwealth commissioners are in Zherela 8, nos. 152, 153. For the docu­ments of the Kurukove commission and the agreement of 1625, see Zbiorpami^tnikow do dziejow polskich 6: 149-241; AIuZR (1863): pt. 3, vol. 1, no. 78. The records of the negotiations of 1630 are given in Zherela 8, nos. 215-18. For a discussion of the Diet ordinance of 1638, see Tomkiewicz, ‘Ograniczenie swobod kozackich w roku 1638’.

⁵⁴ See Hale, War and Society, pp. 80-1.

⁵⁵ As early as the following year, 1626, the Cossacks asked the Diet to permit them to accept payment from Muscovy for the release of captives. In fact, the point at issue was probably that of the Cossacks undertaking expeditions against the Crimea and the Turks at the behest of Mus­covy. See Hrushevs’kyi, Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy, vol. 8, pt. 1, p. 23.

The case of the Kodak fortress, which was rebuilt by the government in 1638 and effectively curbed the Cossack expeditions along the Dnipro to the Black Sea, shows how difficult were the choices that confronted the government in its dealings with the Cossacks. After the ordinance of 1638, which provided that the fortress at Kodak should be rebuilt and manned with a hired garrison, the Ukrainian Cossacks adopted a new tactic and began to make more active use of the Don route, first to the Sea of Azov and then across the Strait of Kerch to the Black Sea. Until the fortress of Azov (Oziv, Azak) was lost by the Don Cossacks and Zap- orozhians to the Turks in 1642, it served as the point of departure for their joint sea campaigns.^[61] With the Turkish seizure of Azov, the Cos­sacks were effectively cut off from the sea, but the Commonwealth had to pay dearly for this achievement. During the Khmelnytsky Uprising, the Cossacks, reinforced by the Crimean Tatars and to some extent by the Ottomans as well, turned their energies on the state itself, against the very government that seemed at last to have resolved the painful dilemma of Cossack expeditions to the menacing Ottoman Empire.

Closely linked with the Cossack seagoing expeditions were problems pertaining to relations between the government and Cossackdom as a military unit in the service of the Commonwealth. An important question affecting the central government’s relations with the Cossacks was that of the payment of wages (zold), which were traditionally promised by Com­monwealth officials but almost never paid on time, if at all. The estab­lishment and disbursement of wages was constantly at the heart of Polish-Cossack negotiations. The government had to agree to progres­sive pay increases to the Cossacks (along with increases in the register), from 10,000 zlotys in 1614 to 40,000 in 1619, then to 50-60,000 in 1621, and 60,000 (with a separate payment to the officers) in 1625. But the money was not paid, or paid with delays, which led to incessant Cossack complaints. Delays in the payment of wages were among the factors that gave impetus to almost every Cossack revolt. Typically, the first justifica­tion offered for the Kosynsky revolt took the form of complaints against the government for its inability to pay the registered Cossacks their due wages. This was the burden of the letter that Kosynsky wrote to his com­rades in August 1591 from the town of Pykiv, which he had taken. He in­formed them that the government was in no hurry to disburse funds and was delaying the matter until winter set in; accordingly, Kosynsky called on the Cossacks to inform government representatives that they could no longer await payment, but would have to fend for themselves.^[62]

Chronic insolvency and inability to pay the registered Cossacks their due wages was not a problem for the Cossacks alone. It was often faced by Polish soldiers as well, and the Kosynsky and Pavliuk uprisings were preceded by soldiers’ confederations.⁵⁸ Revolts of unpaid mercenaries were an everyday occurrence in war-ravaged early modern Europe (in the Netherlands alone there were forty-six such uprisings on the part of Spanish soldiers between 1572 and 1607), and the Commonwealth was no exception to the rule. Revolts of this kind often turned into long-term arrangements in which the rebels managed to stabilize the conduct of daily life on the territory they controlled, including taxation of the local population, a distinct system of regulations and penalties, the election of a leader, and so on. Many of these features were also characteristic of Cossack revolts.⁵⁹

Another important element that related the Cossack wars to the revolts of mercenaries and soldiers was the demand to provide the Cossacks with grain and winter quarters in periods between military campaigns. Insist­ence on Cossack rights to ‘billets and quarters’, reinforced by complaints about the non-payment of promised wages, was an important component of Cossack relations with the authorities throughout the period under consideration. The first complaints against the Cossacks for demanding provisions from private estates even though they had undertaken military campaigns spontaneously, and not on the king’s orders, are dated as early as the beginning of the 1580s. The ordinance of 1591 dealt with this matter, stating that provisions were to be sent to the Cossacks on the lower Dnipro, and that they were to be denied billets and quarters of any kind in the settled area. The Cossacks, naturally, ignored this order, as is apparent from Kosynsky’s decision to collect duties from the population on the territory controlled by his forces. The duties were then distributed to the Cossacks for their maintenance (along with the portion of wages disbursed by the government).⁶⁰

Severyn Nalyvaiko, for his part, attempted to explain and justify Cos­sack actions in the settled area by citing the right of the Cossack Host to winter quarters and provisions. Since his units had returned from their campaign against Moldavia by that time, Nalyvaiko, who treated the campaign as a service to the Commonwealth, represented Cossack as­saults on towns and nobiliary properties in Volhynia and Belarus pre­cisely as efforts to secure military provisions prior to a new expedition in the king’s service. Hryhorii Loboda, the leader of the Lower Dnipro Cos­sacks, also insisted on their right to remain in the settled area after the conclusion of a campaign.

⁵⁸See Lep”iavko, Kozats'ki viiny, pp. 53—4; O. A. Bevzo, ed., L^,vιvs^,kyι Htopys i Ostroz^,kyι Htopysetsⁱ. Dzhereloznavche doslidzhennia, 2nd edn. (Kyiv, 1971), p. 117.

⁵⁹ See Hale, War and Society, p. 171. ⁶⁰ See Lep^,,iavko, Kozatsⁱki viiny, pp. 56—7, 70.

After the Cossacks had ‘rehabilitated’ themselves for the actions of Kosynsky and Nalyvaiko by taking part in the Livonian campaign of 1602, they began to take ‘quarters’ by force in Belarus, and their hetman, Ivan Kutskovych, stated that the king had allegedly given them Mahilioti and the entire Dnipro region to the south of it for ‘billets’ in return for their services. After the Khotyn War of 1621, the Cossacks also demanded that ‘quarters’ be granted them and that Polish soldiers not be billeted in the Kyiv region. Not surprisingly, in demanding quarters for themselves even as they protested the posting of soldiers to their own lands (in Ukraine), the Cossacks found themselves in a highly ambiguous situ­ation. Their demands of this and later periods combined the psychology and agenda of mercenaries with the demands of a settled population whose properties suffered from the quartering of other military forces. The complicated relations between Cossackdom and the Common­wealth government in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were determined, however, not only by the standoff between a mercenary army and a government unable to pay its wages. Most important in this connection was the relationship between a new corporate estate growing in numbers and influence and a weak elective monarchy dependent on the support of traditional social strata. As J. R. Hale notes, the goal of military revolts was ‘not revolution but blackmail’, and the rebels ‘protested against the failure of authority to protect working conditions, not against social systems or war aims’.^[63] Cossack uprisings, by contrast, generally had a much broader agenda, as indicated by their clear social demands.

Let us begin our examination of the social aspect of the Cossacks’ dif­ferences with the authorities by considering the problem of Cossack self­government. Quite early on, it came to center on the question of the election or appointment of the Cossack hetman or leader. Cossack trad­ition, fully manifested in the course of Cossack uprisings and negotiations with the government, called for the election of the leader. The author­ities, who had organized the Cossack register first and foremost in order to establish effective control over the Cossacks, took the position that their leader should be appointed. In the days of Zygmunt August and Stefan Batory, leaders of the registered Cossacks were appointed, but during the wars of the 1590s, the Cossacks acted exclusively under the leadership of hetmans elected by them. After the defeat of those uprisings, in an effort to rehabilitate themselves, the Cossacks asked the gov­ernment to appoint a commissioner for them, but in time, feeling more sure of themselves, they revived the practice of electing their hetmans and soon began to demand that the government confirm this right once again.

Thus, the condition laid down by the government commission of 1614 on royal appointment of the Cossack leader was effectively rejected by the Cossacks. During the commission of 1617, the Cossacks proposed a com­promise—the government was to confirm the leader elected by the Cos­sacks themselves—but at the meeting of the subsequent commission in 1619, they had to agree to the appointment of the leader by the author­ities, even though the actual appointment was postponed to the next Diet. In responding to the Cossack petition after the Khotyn War, the king again insisted on his right to designate the hetman. Only at Kurukove was the government forced to change the formula and accept the earlier Cos­sack proposal: the leader was to be elected by the Cossacks and con­firmed in office by the government. The failed uprisings of 1637—8 then deprived the Cossacks of the victory they had won at Kurukove. Accord­ing to the ordinance of 1638, the principles of Cossack democracy and self-government were set aside, and the registered army came under strict official control: the king now appointed not only the Cossack leader (a commissioner) but also the Cossack colonels, who were selected exclu­sively from Commonwealth nobiliary circles.

The right of the Cossacks to be judged by their own officers was an­other disputed issue in their troubled relations with the government. The right to a separate Cossack jurisdiction in all cases except criminal ones had been guaranteed them by directives dating back to Zygmunt August and Stefan Batory. The ordinance of 1591 also confirmed the separate jur­isdiction of the registered Cossacks. The Cossacks' agreement of 1593 with Oleksander Vyshnevetsky shows a clear effort on their part to extend this privilege to Cossackdom as a whole and to expand its application from the lower Dnipro region, as provided by the ordinance of 1591, to the settled area, as in the times of Zygmunt August and Batory. The fail­ure of the revolt led by Nalyvaiko and Loboda was a great setback to the realization of this Cossack demand, but by no means removed it from the agenda of Polish-Cossack relations. In 1600, when the Cossacks' partici­pation in the Moldavian campaign was being negotiated, they demanded confirmation of the liberties granted by Batory. The Cossack leader Samiilo Kishka made representations for this, as well as for the appoint­ment of a special commissioner (that is, an official directly responsible for the administration of justice to the Cossacks) before the Diet of 1601. The king promised to appoint a special judge for the Cossacks, extending Cossack rights to those prepared to take part in the Livonian campaign. He also recognized the jurisdiction of the Cossack leader over his men while on campaign. In the settled area, however, Cossacks were to be sub­ject to the jurisdiction of the local starostas. That restriction was rein­forced by a Diet resolution of 1607 that did not recognize Cossack jurisdiction in the settled area (either in the royal domains or on nobiliary holdings). The same position was taken in a Diet resolution of 1609 that nevertheless implied the de facto existence of separate Cossack courts in the settled area. The commission of 1614 also denied recognition of the Cossacks' right to separate jurisdiction.

It was only the turbulent rise of Cossackdom during the first two decades of the seventeenth century and the need for their services in the war with Muscovy that forced the Commonwealth government to make concessions. The commission of 1619 not only increased the Cossack register but also acknowledged the separate jurisdiction of the registered Cossacks on royal domains in the settled area. The Kurukove agreement of 1625 had confirmed the Cossacks' right of separate jurisdiction on the lower Dnipro and in the royal domains, but not on private estates, as they had demanded since the end of the Khotyn War. Not surprisingly, the Cossacks were in no hurry to fulfill their old promises to depart from pri­vate estates for the royal domains, and effectively availed themselves of their own jurisdiction there as well.^[64] The ordinance of 1638, while as­signing exclusive jurisdiction over the Cossacks to a royal commissioner, generally upheld the principle that the Cossacks were not subject to local authority. Thus, as a result of protracted armed conflicts and difficult ne­gotiations, the registered Cossacks acquired the right of separate juris­diction, but their numbers and territory of residence were strictly regulated by the ruling circles.

The question of economic privilege also played an important role in Cossack relations with the government. From the very beginning, the Cossacks insisted on special hunting and fishing rights. Even Stefan Bat- ory's well-known proclamation of 1582 had been issued as a result of Cossack complaints that royal officials were infringing on these ‘liberties' of theirs. Later the Cossacks continually raised demands that the liberties granted by Batory be confirmed, and after Khotyn they requested special permission to hunt and fish at will.^[65] At Kurukove the government found itself obliged to grant the Cossacks the right to practice trades, engage in commerce and sell liquor, and later the Cossacks asked for a special royal privilege to that effect. Another painful question in relations between the Cossacks and the Commonwealth government was that of the vidumershchyna—the right of the Cossacks, guaranteed since the times of Zygmunt August and Stefan Batory, to pass on their property as an in­heritance. Since royal officials were constantly attempting to claim this property, the Cossacks insistently demanded their right to vidumersh- chyna. In time, the issue receded into the background (the government evidently managed to obtain compliance with this Cossack right from the starostas), while that of recognizing the entitlement of Cossack widows and children to Cossack rights—that is, establishing such rights as valid not only for the duration of an officially sanctioned campaign, and as per­taining not only to the Cossack, but also to his entire family, even after his death—grew more acute.

Surprisingly enough, these demands were effectively recognized in the ordinance of 1638, which was otherwise disastrous for the Cossacks. The cadastre of Cossack landholdings and proprietors, which was to serve as the basis for the subsequent recruitment of the registered Cossack Host, not only acknowledged the entitlement of Cossack families to Cossack rights, but also recognized Cossackdom as a distinct hereditary order of landowning warriors.^[66] Despite considerable restrictions on Cossack self-government and the effective subordination of the register to govern­ment officials, the ordinance of 1638 represented a distinct victory for Cossackdom as a corporate estate. All that the government sought to do under the circumstances was to restrict the new estate in numerical and social terms. Especially significant with regard to the latter restriction were the points of the ordinance prohibiting Cossacks from residing in towns and owning municipal land (the only exceptions were Korsun, Cherkasy, and Chyhyryn) and forbidding burghers to join the Cossack Host, enroll their sons in it, or permit their daughters to marry Cossacks. From the very beginning, burghers had been an important source of new recruitment, as they lived alongside Cossacks in castles and forts, which gave them unlimited opportunities to enter Cossack ranks. This provi­sion of the 1638 ordinance followed the line taken by the commission of 1617. At that time, the government had made the specific demand (ac­companied by a list of urban professions and trades) that burghers be barred from the Host and prohibited from enrolling in Cossack units in the future.

In the course of its dealings with the Cossacks, the Commonwealth government generally sought to limit the number of registered Cossacks, as they not only required payment but were also supposed to enjoy spe­cial rights and privileges. What the Commonwealth ruling circles wanted was an inexpensive (at times even unpaid) army that was ready to be mo­bilized at any moment. Under these conditions, every mobilization of the Cossacks for war was accompanied by promises of payment and the granting of special rights, while every termination of military operations was followed by attempts to disband the Cossacks without paying the promised wages and decreasing (if not entirely abolishing) the Cossack register. The Cossacks, for their part, made use of every military cam­paign to regain (and often enlarge) their former rights and privileges and, above all, to increase the number of registered Cossacks eligible to enjoy those rights. They usually referred to the privilege granted by Stefan Bat- ory, who had first established a list of Cossack rights and liberties, as well as to freely interpreted royal letters of intent, Diet resolutions, and ordin­ances. The government, for its part, almost always sought to limit Cos­sack privileges to the duration of military campaigns and to the Cossacks whose names were entered in the register. Conversely, the Cossacks maintained that privileges once granted were permanently valid.

The question of the number of Cossacks in the register was one of the most difficult in relations between Cossackdom and the Commonwealth government. In general, the register showed a tendency to expand. At first it increased from 300 Cossacks under Zygmunt August to 500 under Ste­fan Batory. The ordinance of 1591 attempted to keep it to 1,000 men, but by 1600 there were already 4,000 taking part in the Moldavian campaign, and 6,000 in the Livonian campaign of 1602. The numbers increased even more during the early seventeenth-century expeditions against Mus­covy. This trend notwithstanding, the commission of 1617 attempted to bring the number of registered Cossacks back down to 1,000. The Cos­sacks refused, as they had every reason to do. By the following year, Hetman Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny had already fielded an army of 20,000 men for participation in the Muscovite War. The commission of 1620 had to take this into account and proposed to limit the register to 3,000. The Cossacks replied that they had already dropped 5,000 men from the register, while the rest were to be maintained out of the salary as­signed to 3,000 registered Cossacks. Thus the question of how many Cossacks were to remain enrolled in the register was never settled.

In return for their participation in the Khotyn War, in which the Cos­sacks mustered an army of 40,000, they asked the king to increase the official register, but the reply from Warsaw was negative. Not until the clash of the Cossack and Commonwealth armies at Kurukove (1625) was the register officially increased to 6,000. After the Cossack uprising of 1630, Stanislaw Koniecpolski had to agree to a register of 8,000, but this figure was not ratified by the Diet, which agreed only to 7,000. The defeat of the uprising of 1636—7 led to the ordinance of 1638, which again reduced the register to 6,000. As may be judged from data about the number of Cos­sack forces in the Muscovite and Khotyn Wars, the number of registered Cossacks was at least ten times less than the total of battle-ready men, but Cossackdom attempted to treat the rights extended to those enrolled in the register as rights of Cossacks in general.

What were the social roots of Cossack demands on the Commonwealth government, and who influenced their social and political agenda? It is safe to say that if the growth of Cossackdom was due to the influx of burghers and peasants, in ideological terms the Cossacks most resembled the boyars, the least prestigious element of the military-service stratum of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and subsequently of the Commonwealth, which found itself excluded from the noble order in the process of the lat­ter’s formation. In the opinion of Serhii Lepiavko, it was precisely the boyars who, by joining Cossack ranks en masse in the latter half of the sixteenth century, infused Cossackdom with certain elements of their so­cial ideology, most notably an emphasis on the rights and privileges that were their due as ‘knightly men’ rendering military service to the state.^[67] Following the adoption of the Lithuanian Statute (1566) and the Act of the Union of Lublin (1569), the boyar servitors found themselves ex­cluded from the noble order and deprived of the privileges accorded the ‘noble lords’. The Union of Lublin gave definitive form and legal expres­sion to the rights of the noble order on the whole territory of the Com­monwealth, extending the rights of the Polish nobility to the ruling stratum of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Ukrainian lands.

The ideology and social identity of the Cossacks must also have been influenced by members of the petty nobility, whose nobiliary rights were not fully recognized by the government, and who were rather well repre­sented in Cossack ranks. Although Crown Field Hetman Stanislaw Zolkiewski asserted in the course of the Nalyvaiko uprising, which was characterized by broad peasant participation, that the rebels were seeking to destroy the noble order as a whole,^[68] the ideology of the Cossack offi­cers was more pro-nobiliary than anti-nobiliary in the sense that the offi­cers were demanding for themselves certain rights and privileges equivalent to those of the nobility.^[69]

The references to knightly rights in the records of the Polish-Cossack negotiations carried on by the Kurukove commission (1625) and the Cossacks’ efforts to take part in the election of the new Polish king (1632) may be considered the clearest attempts on the part of Cossackdom to approximate the status of the nobility. In 1632, following the death of Zygmunt III, the Cossacks appealed to the primate of Poland with a letter in which they effectively claimed the right to take part in the election of the new king. The letter noted that ‘all together and unanimously we should choose and enthrone by free election... the most illustrious Wladyslaw'. The Cossacks also ‘humbly' asked the primate that Royal Prince Wladyslaw, with whom they were well acquainted from the Kho­tyn campaign, become the ‘Lord of the Kingdom of Poland and of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania'.^[70]

A similar formula was repeated in the letter of 9 June 1632 from the Zap- orozhian Host to the Convocation Diet. Here the Cossacks wrote that as members of the Commonwealth, they humbly and submissively re­quested Wladyslaw's election to the Polish throne.^[71] Mute evidence of the Cossacks' desire to take part in the election of the king is also contained in the request, included in the instructions to their delegation, that the ‘freedoms belonging to knightly men' be granted them at last.^[72] At a pri­vate audience, the Cossack envoys gave clearer expression to the desire of the Cossack officers to participate in the king's election, only to be re­buffed with an answer that was not only negative but demeaning.^[73] By the beginning of the seventeenth century the era of social mobility was a his­torical relic, military service was no longer being rewarded with land grants, and the rare instances of attainment of noble status were taking place on an individual basis.

The Cossack State

The spring of 1648 saw the outbreak of a new revolt in Zaporizhia that was fated to bring about a fundamental change in the status of Cossack- dom and its relations with other elements of Ukrainian society, as well as to involve Cossackdom in the process of state-building, thereby altering state boundaries and the international balance of power in Eastern Eur­ope. At the head of the uprising was a captain from Chyhyryn (after the revolt of 1638, Cossacks were not allowed to assume ranks above that of captain) named Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Descended from the Cossackized petty nobility, Orthodox by religion, Khmelnytsky managed to transform the Cossack revolt into a mighty revolution that swept up all strata of Ukrainian society, from the traditional burgher and peasant allies of Cos- sackdom to the more cautious higher Orthodox clergy and the nobility, which was generally ill-disposed to the Cossacks. At the same time, the Khmelnytsky Uprising displayed aspects of a peasant revolt, a religious war, and a regional insurrection against the center; it was also an out­standing example of the close association of political, social, religious, and national elements in the rebellions of the mid-seventeenth century.^[74]

The military success of the uprising in its initial stage was achieved through Khmelnytsky’s alliance with the Crimean Khan Islam Giray III. In May 1648, with the support of the Noghay Horde led by the khan’s vas­sal Tughay Bey, Khmelnytsky twice defeated the standing army of the Commonwealth (at Zhovti Vody and Korsun), taking prisoner the Crown grand and field hetmans, the military leaders of the Kingdom of Poland. The Cossack victories triggered a peasant war, and during the summer of 1648 the uprising quickly engulfed the settled area. In addition to the Kyiv and Chernihiv palatinates of the Commonwealth, it spread to the Right Bank of the Dnipro. In September, the allied Cossack and Crimean forces routed a large Polish army at Pyliavtsi. After this, the rebel army proceeded westward, laying siege to Polish garrisons at Lviv and Zamosc, which meant crossing the Polish-Ukrainian ethnic boundary. In November 1648, having obtained the election of Jan Kazimierz, a candidate accept­able to the Cossacks, to the Polish throne, Khmelnytsky stopped his west­ward advance and, returning to the Dnipro region, ceremonially entered the ancient princely capital and center of the Orthodox metropolitanate, the city of Kyiv. Thus the Cossack hetman took charge of a territory that had not previously been touched by Cossack revolts, while his military ex­ploits exceeded the boldest expectations of his predecessors.^[75]

What influence, if any, did this staggering success have on the ideology, demands, and self-assessment of the Cossack order? Let us begin to address this question by examining the Cossack claims that were used to legitimize the commencement of the Cossack war of 1648. Like the first Cossack revolt led by Kryshtof Kosynsky, the Khmelnytsky Uprising began with a personal confrontation between a nobiliary Cossack officer and a royal administrative office. The issue in 1648, as in 1591, was that of the seizure by the starosta’s office of an earlier land grant to a Cossack leader. There were considerable differences, however, between these os­tensibly similar cases. In rousing the Cossacks to revolt, Khmelnytsky, unlike Kosynsky, could appeal to a well-developed array of Cossack rights and liberties. If, for example, Kosynsky called on the Cossacks to revolt because of a delay in the payment of wages, for Khmelnytsky this violation of the contract between the government and the hired Cossack army was clearly of secondary importance: the non-payment of wages for a whole five-year period was far from the first claim advanced by the Cos­sacks at the start of the Khmelnytsky Uprising. The main emphasis was on the government’s infringement of the rights of Cossackdom as a cor­porate estate.⁷⁴

The claims of Cossackdom as a whole were most fully presented by Khmelnytsky in instructions to envoys of the Zaporozhian Host who were dispatched to Warsaw after the first rebel victories of June 1648.⁷⁵ The document stressed first and foremost that the Cossacks were ‘knightly men’, servants of the king, hence the tenants (derzhavtsi) of royal do­mains had no right to treat them as slaves. Firstly, the starostas and ten­ants were alleged to have taken land from the Cossacks and imposed taxes on them. The second charge was violation of the corporate privileges of members of Cossack families: before the uprising, widows, regardless of age, had been obliged either to remarry into the Cossack order or to vol. 8, pt. 2, pp. 174-95; pt. 3, pp. 5-121; Stepan Tomashivs’kyi, ‘Mizh Pyliavtsiamy i Zamos- tiam’, Zherela 6 (1913): 1-144; id., ‘Narodni rukhy v Halyts’kii Rusi 1648 r.’, ZNTSh 23-4 (1898): 1—138; id., PershyipokhidBohdanaKhmel’nyts’koho vHalychynu (Dva misiatsiukrams’kol polityky, 1648 r.) (Lviv, 1914); Valerii Smolii and Valerii Stepankov, Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi. Sot- sial’no-politychnyi portret (Kyiv, 1993), pp. 70-150; Ivan Storozhenko, Bytva na Zhovtykh vodakh, 2nd edn. (Dnipropetrovsk, 1997); id., Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi i voienne mystetstvo u vyzvol’nii viini ukratns’koho narodu seredyny XVII stolittia, vol. 1, Voienni dii' 1648—52 rr. (Dnipropetrovsk, 1996), pp. 79-210; Fedoruk, Zovnishn’opolitychna diial’nist’, pp. 5-42.

⁷⁴ Khmelnytsky’s transition from complaints of a personal nature (the seizure of his estate) to a list of grievances of the Cossack order as a whole is well exemplified in the letters that he wrote in the spring of 1648. See Dokumenty Bohdana Khmel’nyts’koho, 1648-57 ( = DBKh), ed. Ivan Kryp”iakevych and I. L. Butych (Kyiv, 1961), nos. 1-2, 4-6. On the development of the aims of the revolt during 1648, see Fedoruk, Zovnishn’opolitychna diial’nist’, pp. 5-42; Mytsyk, ‘Politychni kontseptsii' Bohdana Khmel’nyts’koho’; Smolii and Stepankov, Ukrams’ka derzhavna ideia, pp. 24-45.

⁷⁵ DBKh, no. 5.

perform labor obligations. The same had applied to parents whom the Cossacks took into their families in order to look after them: the Cossacks had to pay duties to the lord for them as non-Cossacks or perform labor obligations on their behalf. The Cossacks also complained about the colonels appointed by the government, who swindled them instead of protecting them and left them defenseless against the exactions of the soldiers.

Thus, in the settled area, the main problems were the advance of the large latifundia (in this connection, Cossacks first made mention of Jewish leaseholders, who had earlier been absent from their petitions)^[76] and the non-recognition of Cossackdom as a corporate estate enjoying specific privileges. In Zaporizhia, the problems were the prohibition of sea campaigns (effectively prevented by the Poles and Ottomans by means of the fortresses at Kodak and Azov) and the taxation of Cossack trades. Not only were the Zaporozhians forbidden to go to sea but the proceeds of their hunting and fishing were also taxed, and their war booty was taken away, along with their Tatar captives.

To what did the Cossacks aspire in June 1648 after their first brilliant victories over the standing army? Aside from putting an end to the viol­ations of Cossack rights about which they had complained, they de­manded an increase of the register from 6,000 to 12,000 men, the right to elect their own officers, the payment of their overdue wages, and an end to the persecution of the Orthodox Church. In many ways, this was the traditional list of Cossack claims, reinforced by the demand for a large expansion of the register. Characteristically, the Commonwealth author­ities, taken aback by the unexpected success of the uprising, were inclined to accept most of the Cossack demands (if worst came to worst, even the 12,000-man register) in order to stop the war.^[77]

In November 1648, after the catastrophic defeat of the Polish forces at Pyliavtsi and the advance of the rebel army to Zamosc, the Cossacks dis­patched another embassy with new demands to Warsaw. Here they again insisted on the confirmation of a register of 12,000 and asked for the abol­ition of the standing army in Ukraine, as well as for a free hand in foreign policy. Almost all the points advanced by the Cossacks pertained exclu­sively to themselves, leaving aside the peasants, burghers, nobility, and other participants in the uprising. In practice, they were seeking new con­ditions for their incorporation as a corporate estate into a somewhat reformed Commonwealth. According to the new Cossack demands, the hetman was to become a royal starosta and the Cossacks were to be exempted from any jurisdiction other than that of the king himself, thereby obtaining nobiliary rights at least in the courts. The Cossacks de­manded the same judicial rights as those of the Tatars in Lithuania, and, as the Polish note on the matter stated explicitly, the Lithuanian Tatars were subject to nobiliary jurisprudence.^[78]

Demands of a broader nature pertaining to political, religious, and na­tional issues were presented at almost the same time in a letter from Khmelnytsky to Royal Prince Jan Kazimierz. Formulated as requests and petitions to the future king, they came down to two postulates: the estab­lishment of the king’s authoritarian rule, with concomitant limitations on the power of the border lords or ‘kinglets’; and the accommodation of the Orthodox religion through the abolition of the Union.^[79] To be sure, not all elements of Cossack ideology or aspirations were reflected in diplo­matic sources. Moreover, much of the Cossack battery of ideas may ei­ther have been deliberately brought forward or intentionally passed over in silence during the negotiations, depending on the military situation or the current plans of the hetman’s administration. Polish observers, for ex­ample, constantly suspected that Khmelnytsky was not prepared to end the rebellion and was hatching plans far more ambitious than those elab­orated in his letters and embassies.^[80] One such plan, according to the in­formation of Polish governing circles, was that of establishing a separate Cossack principality.

Such a project had been in the air since the 1590s. At that time, the Catholic bishop of Kyiv, Jozef Wereszczynski, had proposed the creation of a Cossack principality in the Dnipro region to protect the Common­wealth from Tatar attack. In 1596, the notion of demarcating a territory between the Southern Buh and Dnister rivers for the organization of a Cossack army had been advanced by the Cossack rebel leader Severyn Nalyvaiko.^[81] Throughout the 1610s and 1620s, some (including King Zygmunt III himself) had accused the Cossacks of making efforts to esta­blish a separate Commonwealth.^[82] Not surprisingly, in the summer of 1648, the spectacular achievements of the Cossack uprising revived old fears among the Polish nobility, alarmed by Khmelnytsky’s triumphs, that the creation of a Cossack polity was in the offing. Rumors began to circulate among the nobility and government officials of Khmelnytsky’s creation of a ‘free Cossack principality’ and of the establishment of a ‘Ruthenian monarchy’, and the examples of the Netherlands and the Neapolitan revolt of 1647 were recalled.^[83]

The first reliable evidence that the idea of sovereignty was current in the Cossack officer milieu dates from February 1649, when Khmelnytsky received a Commonwealth mission in Pereiaslav that had been dis­patched to arrange a truce. In response to the government’s proposal to increase the official register to 12,000 or even 15,000 and set out on a campaign beyond the borders of the Commonwealth, Khmelnytsky pres­ented a much broader and more ambitious agenda for the new stage of the uprising. In particular, he stated that just as he had earlier fought to avenge his personal injustice, so he would now fight for the Orthodox faith and liberate the whole nation of Rus’ from Polish bondage. As the source of his strength and the social base for the realization of his plan, he indicated the common people, ‘for this is our right hand—people who, having been unable to endure slavery, have gone to the Cossacks’. Khmelnytsky promised to drive the princes and nobles beyond the Vistula, permitting only those to remain who would accept the authority of the Zaporozhian Host and not ‘buck’ in the king’s direction.⁸⁴

The boundary of the hypothetical Cossack realm was determined by the western limits of Ukrainian ethnic territory, extending as far as Lviv, Kholm, and Halych, or even Lublin and Cracow. Khmelnytsky’s goal was to establish a ‘sovereign principality’ within the Commonwealth, that is, to realize intentions of which the hetman had long been suspected by Pol­ish observers. The hetman referred to himself on one occasion as ‘sole ruler and autocrat of Rus’’ and on another as ‘lord and palatine of Kyiv’, but in both cases he was speaking of unlimited, God-given authority (‘God gave it to me, and, what is more, through my sword’) over the territory taken by the Cossacks.⁸⁵ Cossack tradition was represented in Khmelnytsky’s project by the idea of establishing the rule of the Zaporozhian Host over the whole territory controlled by the Cossacks. At the same time, because the hetman’s plan did not provide for a complete break with the Commonwealth, this also reflected the Ruthenian nobil­ity’s dreams of a new order that would create a Ruthenian polity within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Considering the exigencies of diplomatic negotiations and the specific character of the source that recorded Khmelnytsky’s words during the Pereiaslav commission (the diary of the Commonwealth envoys), it is dif­ficult to determine to what extent these words reflected the hetman’s im­mediate plans as opposed to his desire to stir up the worst fears of Commonwealth politicians. After all, having presented the Common­wealth commissioners with the prospect of the further development and

⁸⁴ VUR, 2: 108-9.

⁸⁵ VUR, 2: 108, 111.

institutionalization of the uprising, Khmelnytsky in fact agreed to much more modest conditions for an armistice with the Commonwealth. He accepted the royal banner and mace from the commissioners and de­clared his own loyalty and that of his whole Host to the king and the Com­monwealth. The truce conditions considerably limited the territory under the hetman’s control, which was off limits to Polish forces, as well as to the royal administration and the nobility. The boundaries of this territory followed the Horyn and Prypiat rivers, extending to Kamianets- Podilskyi in the south-west.^[86] This was clearly the territory to which Khmelnytsky referred as an established sovereign state (udzielne odzierzane panstwo')^[87] when he told the commissioners that he did not know whether peace could be preserved if the Cossacks should prove unsatisfied with the ‘state’ they had obtained and a register of 20,000-30,000.

Although the actual conditions put forward by Khmelnytsky at Pereiaslav were far more modest than the maximum program of creating a sovereign principality with its border at the Vistula, they were also in­tended to establish Ukrainian autonomy in the Commonwealth, and in that respect they went much further than traditional Cossack demands. There was no mention not only of sea expeditions (these were in fact re­nounced) or of the payment of wages, but even of the size of the register. Khmelnytsky rejected the commissioners’ proposal to attach a specific figure to the Cossack register, asserting, ‘why write in so few of them when there can be as many as a hundred thousand of them; there will be as many as I want’.^[88] First and foremost were the questions of the bound­ary of the ‘sovereign state’, the defense of the Orthodox Church through the abolition of the Union, and the representation of Orthodox Rus’ in the Senate. In his letter to the king upon the conclusion of the negoti­ations, Khmelnytsky devoted special attention to demands of a religious and national character. The king was asked to appoint a Kyivan palatine ‘of the Rus’ nation’ and ‘of the Greek rite’, as well as to grant the Ortho­dox metropolitan of Kyiv a seat in the Senate so that there would be at least three representatives of Rus’ in that institution—the Kyivan pal­atine, the castellan of Kyiv, and the Orthodox metropolitan.⁸⁹

The new course of Cossack diplomacy, no longer oriented on the de­fense of the extraterritorial rights of Cossackdom as an order but of the rights of the territory controlled by the Cossacks as a separate (au­tonomous) polity, as well as the rights of the Orthodox Church through­out the Commonwealth, became fully apparent in the course of negotiations with Polish politicians after the victorious Battle of Zboriv in August 1649. At Zboriv, Khmelnytsky almost succeeded in defeating the royal forces, led by the king himself. Only pressure from the hetman’s un­reliable ally, the Crimean khan, forced him to open negotiations with the king.^[89] The most detailed point put forward by the Cossacks at Zboriv pertained to the Cossack register and the demarcation of Cossack terri­tory. The Cossacks themselves undertook to establish the register on the territory that they controlled, but declined to specify the number to be enrolled in advance. The territory under their administration was to ex­tend from the Dnister River to Bar and Starokostiantyniv, then along the Sluch and Prypiat rivers to the Dnipro, past the Dnipro from Liubech to Starodub, and then along the Muscovite boundary.^[90]

By moving the western border to the east, from Kamianets to Bar and from the Horyn River to the Sluch, Cossack diplomacy was in fact mak­ing a concession to the Poles as compared with the conditions of the Pereiaslav truce. In the final draft of the Polish-Cossack agreement, for­mulated as a ‘Declaration of Grace’ on the part of Jan Kazimierz,^[91] the western border of Cossack territory was shifted even further east, to Vin­nytsia and Bratslav. Khmelnytsky also had to abandon claims to lands along the Prypiat and on the Left Bank. In general, the Zboriv negoti­ations proceeded under pressure from the Cossacks’ unreliable ally, the Crimean khan, who forced the rebels to take a softer line on certain key questions than they had maintained at the Pereiaslav commission.

The number of registered Cossacks had to be limited to 40,000. The Cossacks were prohibited from selling liquor, since that right was reserved to nobiliary landowners. The king placed Chyhyryn ‘under the mace’ of Bohdan Khmelnytsky and promised to appoint Orthodox nobles to of­fices in the palatinates of Kyiv, Bratslav, and Chernihiv. Some of the Cos­sacks’ religious demands were thus satisfied by the king, while others, such as the demand for abolition of the Union, were deferred to the Diet. The session of the Diet convened at the end of 1649 refused to outlaw the Uniate Church, but, more importantly for the Cossacks, recognized a separate Cossack polity, which it restricted territorially and militarily.

The Treaty of Zboriv proved only a temporary compromise in the Cossack war with the Commonwealth. Both sides were dissatisfied with its terms and merely bided their time until they could revise it to their advan­tage. The Zboriv agreement could not serve (indeed, did not even attempt to serve) as a viable model for the incorporation of the new Cossack polity into the Commonwealth. The Cossack administrative (regimental) sys­tem established in eastern Ukraine in the first year and a half of the war bore no relation to the traditional Polish system of palatinates and starosta districts. Khmelnytsky and his officers remained outside that system: the hetman did not become palatine of Kyiv, Bratslav, or Chernihiv. The transfer of Chyhyryn to his rule was more in accord with the older instance of granting the Cossacks Trakhtemyriv as their base than with any notion of including the Cossack hetman in the ruling elite or administrative struc­ture of the Commonwealth. Nor were matters changed by the king’s promise to assign offices in the three eastern palatinates to representatives of the Orthodox nobility. A true compromise was not attained not only because the Poles were not prepared for it but also because compromise was no longer acceptable to the Cossacks.^[92] Khmelnytsky and his en­tourage now had their eyes on much broader horizons, described in gen­eral terms by the hetman at the proceedings of the Pereiaslav commission.

Regardless of the incongruity between the conditions of the Treaty of Zboriv and the actual victories achieved by Cossack arms in the cam­paigns of 1648—9, Zboriv marked an important advance for the Cossacks in their quest for international recognition of their polity and became a constant point of reference and benchmark for Cossack diplomacy. After Zboriv, difficult new ordeals awaited the Cossacks. Khmelnytsky’s defeat at the Battle of Berestechko in June-July 1651, brought about by the trea­son of the Crimean khan,^[93] led to the signing of the humiliating Treaty of Bila Tserkva in September of the same year. This treaty was a de jure abol­ition of Cossack ‘sovereign’ statehood, even if a de facto continuation was permitted in greatly restricted form. The Cossack register was reduced to 20,000, and the Cossacks were allowed to reside only in the royal domains of the Kyiv palatinate. The nobles gained the right to return to their hold­ings throughout Ukraine and to take over the collection of all revenues. Hetmans were to be confirmed in office by the king, and colonels by the hetman and the king. The Cossacks were prohibited from maintaining any relations with foreign powers. In many respects, this was a throwback to the situation before the Khmelnytsky Uprising, and the Commonwealth commissioners made no particular attempt to conceal this in their efforts to limit the register to 6,000, or 8,000, or, at most, 12,000 Cossacks.^[94]

An attempt was thus made to reduce the Cossacks once again to the status of a numerically limited corporate estate, but it was now too late for this. The clause of the Treaty of Bila Tserkva that forbade the Crown army to billet its soldiers in the Kyiv palatinate (or to proceed beyond Zhyvotiv in the Bratslav region before the register was drawn up) left the Cossacks in de facto control of the whole territory of the Kyiv palatinate, which thus became a ‘sovereign’ Cossack domain. Clearly, the Cossack leadership was not prepared to give up its ‘state-building’ role. Nor were the new conditions acceptable to the burghers and peasants who were to revert to royal and nobiliary jurisdiction. The Treaty of Bila Tserkva also deprived the Orthodox nobility of the right to hold office in the three east­ern palatinates and canceled all grants of property made to the Orthodox Church during the Khmelnytsky Uprising.^[95] Thus all Ukraine, not only Cossackdom, was dissatisfied with the treaty conditions, so that the re­newal of hostilities was only a matter of time.

The Cossack Host took its revenge for the defeat at Berestechko as early as May 1652 at the Battle of Batih in Podilia. There, a Polish army of 30,000 was surrounded and completely destroyed; its commander, Crown Field Hetman Marcin Kalinowski, his son, and the flower of the Polish cavalry perished.^[96] De facto, the victory at Batih meant that the conditions of the Treaty of Bila Tserkva no longer applied, but they re­mained in effect de jure until the siege of Zhvanets (also in Podilia), which lasted from September to December 1653. There the Crimean khan played a role similar to the one he had taken on at Zboriv in 1649. Rescu­ing the Polish army led by King Jan Kazimierz from imminent defeat, the khan refused to continue military action and opened negotiations with the Polish side. In the course of the Tatar-Polish negotiations, in which the Cossack took no formal part, a verbal understanding (not confirmed in writing) was reached to the effect that the status of Cossackdom should revert to the conditions laid down in the Treaty of Zboriv.

It is difficult to determine the meaning of the informal Polish-Cossack agreement reached at Zhvanets.^[97] Some scholars construe them as a mere reversion to the Zboriv guarantees given to Cossackdom as an order, not to the Cossack polity with the borders established at Zboriv.^[98] Moreover, the lack of any text of the Polish-Tatar agreement, the Cossacks' refusal to participate in the negotiations, and the brief duration of the compro­mise (owing to the Zaporozhian Host's acceptance of Moscow's protect­orate in January of the following year, 1654) make it impossible to ascertain the parameters of the Polish-Cossack understanding in detail. All that can be said with certainty is that both sides considered it to have been imposed upon them by circumstance, and neither regarded it as a lasting arrangement. The Polish side regarded the return to the Zboriv conditions as a defeat, while the Ukrainian side did not believe that the peace would last and, as shown by the subsequent agreement with Mus­covy, aspired to much greater rights not only for the Cossack order, but also for the whole Cossack state.

The Cossack Council of Pereiaslav (January 1654), which announced that the Zaporozhian Host and its lands were coming under the ‘high hand' of the Muscovite tsar, was the result of the Cossack elite's extensive search for international recognition of the Cossack state as a polity not subject to the Polish king. Khmelnytsky's policy toward Moldavia, beginning in the autumn of 1648 and continuing with his expeditions there in 1650, 1652, and 1653, as well as the marriage of his son Tymish to the daughter of the Moldavian hospodar, Vasile Lupu, gave evidence, among other things, of Khmelnytsky's persistent efforts to join the club of dependent East Euro­pean rulers by way of a marital alliance.^[99] The Crimea, Moldavia, and Wallachia, which were vassals of Istanbul, must have served as models for Khmelnytsky in his negotiations with the Turkish court, which led to the formal acceptance of the sultan's protectorate in 1651. The Ottoman pro­tectorate over the Zaporozhian Host never materialized, but, if it had, the Host would have joined Istanbul's other vassal states in the region, thereby acquiring more or less well-defined rights and obligations with regard to its suzerain. Theoretically, this would have amounted to a considerable step forward in the recognition of Cossack statehood as compared with its in­definite legal status within the Commonwealth.^[100]

On what conditions did Khmelnytsky and his entourage agree to ac­cept Moscow’s protectorate? The Council of Pereiaslav merely an­nounced the agreement; its conditions were arranged in March 1654, when a representative Cossack delegation visited Moscow. The clauses of the agreement were initially proposed by the Cossack side, while the tsar, for his part, accepted, modified, or rejected particular points. The Cos­sack ‘points’, twenty-three in number, were presented in Khmelnytsky’s letter of 17 (27) February to the tsar and became known in subsequent tradition as the ‘Articles of Bohdan Khmelnytsky’.¹⁰² Two of them per­tained to the general recognition of the rights of all corporate estates, one to the confirmation of the proprietary and judicial rights of the nobility, one to the confirmation of the right of municipal officials to be elected from the local population, and one to the confirmation of the rights of the Kyivan metropolitan, which the Cossack envoys were also to discuss sep­arately. Some of the points concerned immediate plans for military ac­tion, but most pertained to the rights of Cossackdom, the Cossack officers, and relations between the tsar and the Cossack polity.

Khmelnytsky requested an increase of the register to 60,000 Cossacks who would receive a stipend from the tsar. The hetman also wanted con­firmation of the ‘rights and liberties... of the Host’ and separate juris­diction for the Cossack order. Furthermore, the hetman’s administration attempted to entrench and somewhat expand the rights of Cossackdom as an estate. The articles spoke not only of the old problem of extending Cossack rights to widows and children but also of recognizing the legal ownership of properties that had come into Cossack hands as a result of the uprising. As for the rights of the hetman himself and of the Cossack officers, the demands were also greater than those of previous years: the hetman was to obtain not only the town of Chyhyryn but the whole starosta district as well, and the rights requested for the officers included not only additional pay but also the granting of mills to be held ex officio. A separate proclamation was to be issued to confirm the corporate privileges of the Cossacks.

As for the status of the Zaporozhian Host under the protection of the tsar, the hetman promised to remain faithful to the tsar and serve accord­ing to his orders. The election of the hetman, however, was an internal

(1993): 177-92; Zygmunt Abrahamowicz, ‘Comments on Three Letters by Khan Islam Gerey III to the Porte (1651)’, HUS 14, nos. 1-2 (June 1990): 132-43; Andras Riedlmayer and Victor Ostapchuk, ‘Bohdan Xmel’nyc’kyj and the Porte: A Document from the Ottoman Archives’, HUS 8, nos. 3-4 (December 1984): 453-73; Iu. A. Mytsyk, 'Dyplomatychne lystuvannia Os- mans’ko'i imperii, iak dzherelo do istorii VyzvoTnoi viiny ukrains’koho narodu seredyny XVII st.’ in Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniia i gosudarstvennye Struktury v Tsentral’noi, Vostochnoi i Iugo-Vostochnoi Evrope (Zaporizhia, 1993), pp. 42-9; Fedoruk, Zovnishn'opolitychna diial'nist', pp. 18-25; id., Mizhnarodna dyplomatiia ipolityka Ukramy, 1654—7, vol. 1, 1654 r. (Lviv, 1996), pp. 63-123.

¹⁰² See the text of Khmelnytsky’s letter in DBKh, pp. 323-5.

Cossack affair: the tsar was merely to be notified of their choice of leader. External affairs remained under the control of the hetman, with the proviso that he inform the tsar about hostile measures of foreign rulers. The principal manifestation of subordinate status was to be the payment of tribute. Khmelnytsky’s letter, making reference to tax-collection prac­tice in other lands, proposed that the tsar be paid a predetermined sum based on the number of his subjects.^[101] The tribute was to be collected by the Cossacks themselves, not by the tsar’s voevodas, unless a ‘voevoda’ were to be appointed from among the locals. The boundaries of the Cos­sack state were not specified in the letter, although it appears from other correspondence of the time that the border between the Zaporozhian Host and Muscovy was to follow the Commonwealth-Muscovite border.

In return for his service, loyalty, and tribute, Khmelnytsky requested, besides confirmation of the above-mentioned conditions, the dispatch of tsarist forces to Smolensk against the Commonwealth, the posting of a unit of 3,000 men on the Cossack-Muscovite border, preparations for an attack on the Crimea with the joint forces of the tsar and the Don Cos­sacks in the event of hostilities on the part of the Horde, and the provision of supplies and materiel to the Kodak garrison and the Zaporozhians. Thus, the issue was that of the tsar’s participation in the war, and, taken in isolation, could be treated as the establishment of conditions for a military alliance.^[102]

How did the tsar and his advisers react to the conditions proposed by Khmelnytsky? In the charter issued to Khmelnytsky on 27 March 1654,^[103] the tsar confirmed the 60,000-man register and all the corporate priv­ileges of Cossackdom enumerated in the hetman’s letter. Mention was also made of confirming the rights granted by the grand princes of Rus' and the Polish kings ‘to people of the clerical and secular orders'. Thus Muscovy agreed to confirm (and, in the case of Cossacks, to extend) the corporate rights and privileges of Ukrainian social strata. The tsar satis­fied the hetman's request to place the Chyhyryn starosta district under his mace and agreed to payments of money and grants to the general and regi­mental staff. As for military plans, the Cossack envoys to Moscow were told that the tsar himself would lead an army against the Commonwealth, would maintain his forces on the Ukrainian border, as always, and would instruct the Don Cossacks to make war on the Crimea in the event of hos­tile actions on the part of the khan. The tsar, however, deferred the dis­patch of provisions to Kodak until the matter of tribute collection was settled and declined to pay a stipend to rank-and-file Cossacks, referring to previous arrangements with Khmelnytsky.

Most of the changes introduced by the tsar referred to points concern­ing the Cossack polity and its relations with Muscovy. The tsar treated his relationship with the Cossacks as one of absolute submission on their part. As the tsar's proclamation on the matter demonstrates, he agreed to the election of the hetman by the Cossacks themselves, but demanded that the newly elected hetman swear an oath ‘of submission and loy­alty'.^[104] As for the collection of tribute, the tsar agreed that it be carried out by local officials but under the supervision of his representatives (con­trary to Khmelnytsky's request). The hetman's foreign-policy preroga­tives were also limited. Contacts with the Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire were forbidden unless authorized by the tsar. Envoys from enemy states were to be arrested and the tsar notified in writing; vis­its by other (friendly) envoys were merely to be reported to the tsar.

Regardless of the tsar's restrictions on the ‘articles' of Bohdan Khmel­nytsky, the Cossack-Muscovite agreement of 1654 was a considerable step forward, both in the confirmation of the corporate privileges of Cossack- dom and in the international recognition of Cossack statehood. Khmel­nytsky managed to obtain much more from Moscow than he could ever have expected from Warsaw under any circumstances. If one compares the agreement with Muscovy with the alternative of an Ottoman protectorate, Khmelnytsky was successful here as well, obtaining perfectly real, not just nominal, protection, since Muscovite forces were almost im­mediately dispatched to commence operations against the Common­wealth, while the Ottoman Empire was not prepared to send its armies against the Commonwealth when the Cossacks most needed them.

The model of the Ottoman protectorate nevertheless played an import­ant role in shaping Cossack views of their relations with Muscovy. In all likelihood, Khmelnytsky applied the conditions of the Ottoman protect­orate over Moldavia, Wallachia, and the Crimea not only to his relations with the sultan but also to his dealings with the tsar. Since these states sometimes adopted rather independent foreign policies in spite of their dependence on Istanbul, the hetman also permitted himself not to reckon with Moscow in his own foreign policy. In 1656, when Muscovy con­cluded a separate peace with the Commonwealth without consulting the Cossacks, the hetman’s administration was on the verge of breaking relations with Moscow, even though the cessation of hostilities with the Commonwealth did not mean that the tsar was denying his protection to the Zaporozhian Host. Completely ignoring the tsar’s prohibition on conducting an independent foreign policy, Khmelnytsky, who never ceased to follow his own inclinations in that sphere, continued hostilities against Poland—his traditional enemy, and now the ally of his nominal protector—with the support of Transylvania.^[105]

A breach with Moscow and a new attempt at an understanding with the Commonwealth were initiated after Khmelnytsky’s death by his succes­sor, Ivan Vyhovsky, who was hetman from 1657 to 1659. The Treaty of Hadiach, concluded in 1658 between Vyhovsky and the Cossack officers on the one hand and Commonwealth commissioners on the other, not only indicated a significant shift in the direction of the Cossack foreign policy but also attested to the readiness of the new hetman and his milieu to sacrifice certain social rights of the Cossack order.^[106] The treaty sought to limit the sovereignty of the Cossack state in order to expand the rights of the Ukrainian nobility within a projected Principality of Rus’ that was to become a constituent of the reformed Commonwealth.

Compared with the agreement of 1654, the Treaty of Hadiach as rati­fied by the Diet in 1659 halved the number of registered Cossacks to 30,000, which was a significant concession on the part of the Cossacks, even in comparison with the Zboriv conditions. True, the hetman reserved the right to maintain a hired army of 10,000, but these add­itional military forces potentially only reduced the significance of Cos- sackdom, making the hetman almost independent of the will of the Cossacks as a whole. Furthermore, the Cossacks lost the right to elect their hetman. In the future, the estates of the three Cossack palatinates were to choose four candidates for the hetmancy, one of whom would be appointed by the king. The Treaty of Hadiach also provided for the rein­troduction of the Polish administrative system, with the prospect of elim­inating the division into regiments, which ultimately would also have had adverse consequences for Cossackdom.

The status of the Cossack polity, which was becoming less Cossack and more nobiliary in social composition, was also considerably reduced. To begin with, the territory of the future state was effectively limited, for it was to include only the palatinates of Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Bratslav, as es­tablished at Zboriv. This was a significant setback as compared with the 1654 understanding with Moscow, which implied that the western boundary of the Cossack state would be moved as far west as conditions permitted. Unlike the agreement with Moscow, the Treaty of Hadiach provided for no payment of tribute, which merely emphasized the transi­tion from treating the Cossack state as a separate polity to regarding it as an integral part of the Commonwealth. The greatest reversal in compar­ison with the Pereiaslav Agreement was the clause of the Treaty of Hadi- ach completely prohibiting the Cossack hetman from receiving foreign embassies, that is, conducting foreign policy of any kind.

If anyone was to benefit from the new understanding with the Com­monwealth, it was the Ruthenian nobility and the Orthodox hierarchy. The original draft of the Treaty of Hadiach contained a whole series of articles resembling portions of the Treaty of Zboriv that were intended to safe­guard the exclusive right of the Orthodox nobility to hold office in palatin­ates under the control of the Cossacks. Moreover, a considerable number of clauses protected the rights of the Orthodox Church on the territory of the Commonwealth outside the Principality of Rus’. But here, too, Ukrainian supporters of the Treaty of Hadiach were doomed to disap­pointment. In the final analysis, Cossackdom did not manage to obtain the full abolition of the church union: the Diet merely prohibited the funding of new Uniate churches. Furthermore, the clauses of the treaty’s first draft on granting senatorial and other offices to the Orthodox were amended by the Diet so as to provide for the alternation of such offices in the Chernihiv and Bratslav palatinates between Orthodox and Catholic nobles.

According to the conditions of the Treaty of Hadiach as ratified by the Diet, however, the nobility won the right to a separate hierarchical struc­ture for the Principality of Rus’, which meant the establishment of offices of chancellors, marshals, vice-treasurers, and so on, as well as the creation of a separate tribunal. The inclusion of the Cossack officer elite in the ranks of the nobility and the appointment of the hetman as palatine of Kyiv and first senator of the principality were intended to ease the in­corporation of the new structure into the Commonwealth. This was the second major attempt after the ordinance of 1638 to incorporate Cos- sackdom into the social structure of the Commonwealth. In 1638, the authorities attempted to subordinate the Cossacks to officers recruited exclusively from the ranks of the nobility. Twenty years later, they agreed to turn the Cossack officers into nobles.

Such an ‘ennoblement’ would undoubtedly have robbed the Cossacks of their elite. They would have had to give up some of their social preroga­tives in favor of the nobility, relinquish their leading role in society, and renounce most institutional forms of their own statehood. Cossackdom could not and would not accept such losses, which was not the least of the reasons for the failure of the policy represented by Ivan Vyhovsky and his entourage in Ukraine. With the fall of Vyhovsky, the attempt of the Cos- sackized nobility to take over Cossackdom’s state-building project ended in failure. For better or for worse, the Cossacks cemented their grip on the state they had created in the bloody revolt of 1648. Until the last years of its existence in the late eighteenth century, the Hetmanate remained an autonomous Cossack polity at least in the terms of its governmental in­stitutions, if not in the social character of its elites.

In the course of a brief historical period lasting less than a century, the Cossacks underwent an evolution impressive in its dynamism and extent of qualitative change from steppe tradesmen to the main agent of colon­ization of the vast Dnipro steppelands; from freebooters in the service of local starostas to a threat to neighboring rulers and saviors of the Com­monwealth in wars with the Ottoman Empire. This evolution culminated in the recognition of Cossackdom as a distinct corporate order with priv­ileges, liberties, and prerogatives of its own. The outbreak of the Khmel­nytsky Uprising led to the establishment by this order of its own state that was recognized, if only to a limited extent, in international agreements. This growth in the influence and significance of Cossackdom did not take place in a vacuum, but was inspired and conceptualized within the frame­work of the dominant ideological postulates of the day, among the most important of which was the defense of the officially persecuted Orthodox faith. It is hardly an exaggeration to state that without an understanding of the role played by religion and, most particularly, by Orthodoxy in the history of the Cossack movement, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend the process of ‘negotiation’ that shaped not only the char­acteristics of Cossackdom as a corporate order but also its social, polit­ical, national, and cultural identity.

TWO