The word “Ukraine,” which is now the name of an indepen­dent country, has medieval origins and was first used by twelfth­century Kyivan chroniclers to define the areas of today’s Ukraine bordering on the Pontic steppes

In the second half of the sev­enteenth century, the term “Ukraine” entered the international vocabulary as one of the names of the Cossack polity created in the course of the Khmelnytsky Uprising (1648-57).

The terms “Ukraine” and “Cossacks” appeared on European maps simultaneously in the first decades of the seventeenth cen­tury. Both terms were first introduced on a map of Eastern Europe produced by a group of cartographers and engravers assembled by Mikalojus Kristupas Radvila (Mikolaj Krzysztof Radziwill) the Orphan, one of the most prominent aristocrats in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The map, entitled “Detailed Description of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Other Adjacent Lands,” cap­tured not only major political and territorial developments but also social and cultural changes that had taken place in the region in the course of the sixteenth century.

The Radvila map covers the territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as they existed before the Union of Lublin (1569) between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lith­uania. It is supplemented by a separate map of the Dnieper River. By far the most important development reflected on the Radvila map was the emergence of a border dividing the Grand Duchy almost in half. Some sections of the new boundary resemble the present-day Ukrainian-Belarusian border, following the Prypiat River and then diverging to the north. The word “Ukraine,” used to describe part of the lands south of the new border, referred to the territory on the Right Bank of the Dnieper extending from Kyiv in the north to Kaniv in the south. Beyond Kaniv, if one trusted the cartographer, there were wild steppes, marked Campi deserti citra Boristenem (Desert plains on this side of the Borysthenes [Dnieper]). “Ukraine” thus covered a good part of the region’s steppe frontier, which had become the homeland of the social group subsequently known as the Ukrainian Cossacks.² The Radvila map provides unique insight into three inter­related processes that shaped the future of the Pontic steppes: the renegotiation of relations between the royal crown and the local aristocracy; the economic and cultural colonization of the Dnieper region; and, last but not least, the emergence of the Ukrainian Cossacks as a powerful military and, later, political and cultural force.