Ukraine

The Radvila map of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania offers a look at Eastern Europe as seen from the palace window of a Lithu­anian aristocrat, not a residence of the king or his servants.

Both Olyka and Ostrih are located in Volhynia, the region that emerges on the map as the main stronghold of the princes. It extends all the way to the Dnieper, covering the region marked on the map as “Volynia ulterior, quae tum Vkraina tum Nis ab aliis vocitatur” (Outer Volhynia, known either as Ukraine or as the Lower [Dnieper]). According to the map, Ukraine, which is only one of three possible names of the region, extends from Kyiv, the seat of Ostrozky as palatine of the region, in the north, to the Ros River and the fortress of Korsun, built by King Stefan Bato- ry in 1581, in the south. It borders on the steppes, called “Campi deserti” (Desert plains), which are depicted with numerous horse­men, suggesting a battleground more than an inhabited desert. It seems to be a fast-growing area, dotted with numerous castles and settlements that had not appeared on earlier maps. The Radvila map covers the territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as they existed before the Union of Lublin (1569), which united the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy (Figure ι, pp.

The reference to “Ukraine” as “Volynia Ulterior” speaks vol­umes about the views and ambitions of the Ostrozky and other Volhynian princes, the likely advisers to the makers of the Radvila map. This usage reflected the perception of “Ukraine” on the Right Bank of the Dnieper as the territories annexed to the Volhynian Land, while stressing the role that the Volhynian princes had played in the colonization of those territories. The lands marked on the Radvila map as “Ukraine,” “Volynia Ulterior,” and “Nis” had indeed become the playground of the Volhynian princes in the second half of the sixteenth century.

The Lublin Diet prohibited the princes from fielding their own armies in wartime. But because of the constant danger of Tatar attacks on the steppe frontier, the Commonwealth’s stand­ing army could not do without the military muscle of the princes. Ostrozky alone could muster an army of twenty thousand soldiers and cavalrymen—ten times the size of the king’s army in the bor­derlands. At various times in his career, Ostrozky was a contender for both the Polish and the Muscovite thrones. The lesser nobles were in no position to defy the powerful magnate, on whom they depended economically and politically. Thus, Ostrozky continued to preside over an extensive network of noble clients who did his bidding in the local and Commonwealth Diets. Not only the local nobility but even the king and the Diet did not dare to challenge the authority of this uncrowned king of Rus'.

The Ostrozkys were the richest Ukrainian princes who main­tained and increased their wealth and influence after the Union of Lublin, but they were not alone. Another highly influential Vol- hynian princely family was the Vyshnevetskys. Prince Mykhailo Vyshnevetsky branched out of his Volhynian possessions, which were quite insignificant in comparison with Ostrozky’s, into the lands east of the Dnieper.

In the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Ukrainian steppes underwent a major political, economic, and cultural transformation. For the first time since the days of Ky- ivan Rus', the line of frontier settlement stopped retreating to­ward the Prypiat marshes and the Carpathian Mountains and began advancing toward the east and south. Linguistic research indicates that two major groups of Ukrainian dialects, Polisian and Carpatho-Volhynian, began to converge from the north and west, respectively, shifting east and south to create a third group of steppe dialects that now cover Ukrainian territory from Zhy- tomyr and Kyiv in the northwest to Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk, and Donetsk in the east, extending as far southeast as Krasnodar and Stavropol in today’s Russia. This movement and mixing of dialects reflected the movement of the population at large.

The major obstacle to the movement of the sedentary pop­ulation in the Pontic steppes was presented by the slave-seeking expeditions of the Crimean Tatars and Noghays, subjects of the Ottomans. The Ottoman Empire, whose Islamic laws allowed the enslavement of non-Muslims only and encouraged the emanci­pation of slaves, was always in need of free labor. The Noghays and the Crimean Tatars responded to the demand, expanding their slave-seeking expeditions to the lands north of the Pontic steppes and often going much deeper into Ukraine and southern Muscovy than the frontier areas. The slave trade supplemented the earnings that the Noghays obtained from animal husbandry and the Crimeans from both husbandry and settled forms of agriculture.

All five routes that the Tatars followed to the settled areas passed through Ukraine. The two routes east of the Dniester led to western Podilia and then to Galicia; the two on the other side of the Boh (Southern Buh) River led to western Podilia and Vol- hynia, and then again to Galicia; and the last passed through what would become the Sloboda Ukraine region around Kharkiv, going on to southern Muscovy. If the Ukrainian lands of the sixteenth century were incorporated into the Baltic trade because of the demand for cereals, their connection to the Mediterranean trade was due largely to Tatar raiding for slaves. Ukrainians became the main targets and victims of the Ottoman Empire’s slave­dependent economy.

Michalon the Lithuanian, a mid-sixteenth-century Ruthe- nian author who visited the Crimea, described the scope of the slave trade by quoting from his conversation with a local Jew: “One Jew there in Tavria beside its only gate, which stands at the head of the customs office, seeing that our people were constantly being shipped there as captives in numbers too large to count, asked us whether our lands also teemed with people, and whence such innumerable mortals had come.” Estimates of the numbers of Ukrainians and Russians brought to the Crimean slave markets in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries vary from one and a half to three million. Children and adolescents brought the highest prices.⁸

The colonization of the steppe areas, marked by numerous settlements on Radvila’s map, was spearheaded by the Volhynian princes and assisted by changes introduced in the region in the aftermath of the Union of Lublin. The Polish crown’s creation of a small but mobile standing army, funded from the profits of the royal domains, helped repel Tatar raids and promote the continuing movement of population into the steppe. Another major incentive for the colonization of the steppe borderlands came from their inclusion in the Baltic trade.

Unexpectedly, colonization was also aided by the introduction of Polish laws and regulations intended to prevent the influx of people into the borderlands, not to increase it. The European demand for grain turned cereal cultivation into a profitable busi­ness, leading to the revival of serfdom. A number of Polish laws introduced in Ukraine by the Third Lithuanian Statute of 1588 deprived peasants of the right to own land or move from one ma­norial estate to another. But the peasants—or, at least, significant numbers of them—refused to obey those laws. They simply fled to the steppe borderlands of Ukraine, where princes and nobles were establishing duty-free settlements that allowed the new arrivals not to perform corv6e labor or pay duties for a substantial period of time. In exchange, they had to settle the land and develop it. As serfdom took stronger hold in the central provinces of the Kingdom and the Grand Duchy, more peasants fled to the east and south. Once their duty-free years expired, some stayed, while others moved deeper into the steppe, where they joined the Cos­sacks, the new borderland segment of the population that was growing in numbers and importance.⁹

The Cossacks are not shown as inhabitants of Ukraine and do not appear on the main Radvila map of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Ukraine seems to be reserved for the Volhynian princes alone. The Cossack settlements located along the Dnieper between Kyiv and Cherkasy, including the town ofTrakhtemyriv, known to Polish chroniclers of the time as the Cossack head­quarters, are not marked on the map as belonging to or settled by the Cossacks. The Cossacks do, however, receive considerable attention on the map of the Dnieper, which depicts the riverbed south of Cherkasy and is richer in specially inserted inscriptions than the main map.

The insert at the very bottom of the Dnieper map explains why the mapmakers decided to produce it. They allegedly did so for three reasons. The first was geographic: the Dnieper is presented as one of the two largest European rivers, the second being the Danube; the Volga is excluded as an Asian river. The second reason was historical: Grand Duke Vytautas, say the map­makers, used to control the Dnieper estuary in days of old. The third reason was military and political: the Dnieper region, rich in natural resources, served as a point of origin for Tatar attacks on Volhynia and was home to the Cossacks, who disrupted Ta­tar slave-hunting expeditions. The Dnieper is shown on the map as the Borysthenes, and there are numerous other references to the ancient Greeks; the Tatars, for example, are called Scythians. But despite repeated allusions to ancient times, the mapmakers’ attention to Cossacks and Tatars indicates their current rather than historical concerns.

The origins and activities of the Cossacks are described in a text box that appears on the Right Bank of the Dnieper. It reads as follows: “The Cossacks are a martial people, mixed with private [individuals], either deprived of nobility or avoiding corv6e la­bor.... They live near the Rapids or cataracts on Dnieper islands fitted with roofs against storms of any kind. They are subject to the command of the chief of the Polish army. They choose their chief from among themselves and easily relieve him of his functions if he proves unsuccessful in subsequent affairs; sometimes they kill him. If they suffer from lack of pay, they customarily make sneak attacks on neighboring towns, and, having razed them, re­turn weighed down with booty, as when, under [Ivan] Pidkovas command, they plundered and razed the Turkish sultan’s town of Tighina in Moldavia. If one of their raids proves less than suc­cessful, they plunder their homelands so greedily that sometimes their fierce attacks are repelled, and they are defeated.”¹⁰

Judging by the location of the text box with information on the origins and activities of the Cossacks, they occupied lands on the Right Bank of the Dnieper and settled islands along the river from the estuary of the Vorskla (on the Left Bank) to the rapids and the Tomakivka (Tomakowka) settlement beyond the rapids. But the Cossacks are not depicted as the first or only actors in the region. One of the text boxes tells of the construction of a castle on the island of Khortytsia by Prince Dmytro Vyshnevetsky in 1556. The only clearly defined Cossack settlement on the map is that of Tomakivka, which “was once a fortified town, as attested by its remains, and is now an island on the Dnieper rejoicing in the same name, on which the Lower [Dnieper] Cossacks live securely, as if in a well-reinforced fortress.” Like other settlements on the Right Bank, it is marked with a cross, indicating that it is a Christian settlement. (With reference to the town of Cherkasy, the mapmakers explain that, despite unsubstantiated claims that its inhabitants were descendants of the Cimmerians of Homer’s day, or professed Islam, it is in fact settled by Ruthenians of the Greek faith.) The map clearly puts the Cossacks on the Christian side of the divide, marking Tatar settlements on the Left Bank with crescents.

In general, this description of the Cossacks fits a much more detailed discussion of their history and way of life provided by the Polish historian Joachim Bielski in Kronika Polska, a history of the Kingdom of Poland written largely by his father, Marcin Bielski, and first published in Cracow in 1597. There the Cossacks are represented as fishermen, trappers, and warriors who live on the Dnieper islands beyond the rapids. Bielski mentions Prince Vyshnevetsky and his settlement on Khortytsia Island, providing a detailed description of Cossack campaigns against the Otto­mans and the Tatars, including the one led to Moldavia by Ivan Pidkova. Like the makers of the Radvila map, Bielski refers in his description of the Cossacks to Greek authors (he mentions the twelfth-century Byzantine chronicler Joannes Zonaras) but is silent on the ethnic origins of the Cossacks and their religious affiliation.¹¹

How does the map’s representation of the Cossacks relate to what we know today about their early history and way of life? The first Cossacks indeed lived on and off the rivers, relying not only on fishing but also on banditry, preying on merchants who trav­eled without sufficient guards. In 1492, the Ukrainian Cossacks made their first appearance in the international arena with such an attack on merchants. According to a complaint sent that year to the grand duke of Lithuania by the Crimean khan, subjects of the duke from the cities of Kyiv and Cherkasy had captured and pillaged a Tatar ship in what appear to have been the lower reaches of the Dnieper. The duke ordered his borderland (the term he used was “Ukrainian”) officials to investigate the Cos­sacks who might have been involved in the raid. He also ordered that the perpetrators be executed and that their belongings, which apparently had to include the stolen merchandise, be given to a representative of the khan.

The khan’s complaints to the grand duke were actually of lit­tle avail. The Lithuanian borderland officials, who happened to be members of Volhynian princely families, were trying to stop Cossack raids with one hand while using the Cossacks to defend the frontier from the Tatars with the other. In 1553, the grand duke sent the captain of Cherkasy and Kaniv, Prince Dmytro Vyshne- vetsky, beyond the Dnieper rapids to build a fortress in order to stop Cossack expeditions from proceeding farther down the river. Vyshnevetsky employed his Cossack servants to accomplish the task. Not surprisingly, the Crimean khan saw the Cossack fortress as an encroachment on his realm, and four years later he sent an army to expel Vyshnevetsky from his redoubt. In folk tradition, Prince Vyshnevetsky became a popular hero as the first Cossack hetman—the title that the Polish army reserved for its supreme commanders—and a fearless fighter against the Tatars and Ot­tomans. He also made it into the Radvila map, whose inscription provides information about the construction of the Vyshnevetsky castle on the island of Khortytsia.

By the mid-sixteenth century, the lands south of Kyiv were full of new or revived settlements, many of which were depicted on the Radvila map, including those of Cherkasy, Kaniv, Korsun, Trakhtemyriv, Moshny, and Olshanka. “And the Kyiv region, for­tunate and thriving, is also rich in population, for on the Borys- thenes and other rivers that flow into it there are plenty of pop­ulous towns and many villages,” wrote Michalon the Lithuanian. He also explained the origins of the settlers: “Some are hiding from paternal authority, or from slavery, or from service, or from [punishment for] crimes, or from debts, or from something else; others are attracted to it, especially in the spring, by richer game and more plentiful places. And, having tried their luck in its for­tresses, they never come back from there.” Judging by Michalons description, the Cossacks were supplementing their gains from hunting and fishing with robbery. He wrote that some poor and dirty Cossack huts were “full of expensive silks, precious stones, sables and other furs, and spices.” There he found “silk cheaper than in Vilnius, and pepper cheaper than salt.” These were delica­cies and luxury items that merchants had been transporting from the Ottoman Empire to Muscovy or the Kingdom of Poland.¹²

The Cossacks became the direct responsibility of Kostian- tyn Ostrozky, the most powerful Volhynian prince, in 1559, when he was appointed palatine of Kyiv. His jurisdiction expanded to Kaniv and Cherkasy, and his responsibilities included the Cos­sacks, who continued to cause problems at home and in the in­ternational arena. In 1577, a Cossack detachment led by a certain Ivan Pidkova captured the city of Iayi, the capital of the Otto­man protectorate of Moldavia. Pidkova was later seized with the help of one of the royal borderland governors, Janusz Zbaraski (Zbarazky), and executed on the orders of King Stefan Batory. Under Batory, the first efforts to recruit the Cossacks into mili­tary service began, not so much to use them as a fighting force as to remove them from the lands beyond the rapids and establish some form of control over that unruly crowd. Thie Livonian War increased the demand for fighting men on the Lithuanian border with Muscovy, and a number of Cossack units were formed in the 1570s, one of them numbering as many as five hundred men.

The reorganization of the Cossacks from militias in the service of local border officials into military units under the command of army officers inaugurated a new era in the history of Cossackdom. For the first time, the term “registered Cossacks” came into use. Cossacks taken into military service and thus included in the “register” were exempted from paying taxes and not subject to the jurisdiction of local officials. They also received a salary. There was, of course, no shortage of those wanting to be registered, but the Polish crown recruited only limited numbers, and salary was paid and privileges recognized only during active service. But those not included in the register to begin with or excluded from it at the end of a given war or military campaign refused to give up their status, giving rise to endless disputes between Cossacks and border officials. The creation of the register solved one problem for the government, only to breed another.

In 1590 the Commonwealth Diet decreed the creation of a force of one thousand registered Cossacks to protect the Ukrainian borderlands from the Tatars and the Tatars from the unregistered Cossacks. Although the king issued the requisite ordinance, little came of it. By 1591, Ukraine was engulfed by the first Cossack uprising. The Cossacks, who until then had been ha­rassing Ottoman possessions—the Crimean Khanate, the Prin­cipality of Moldavia (an Ottoman dependency), and the Black Sea coast—now turned their energies inward. They were rebelling not against the state but against their own “godfathers”—the Vol- hynian princes, in particular Prince Janusz Ostrogski (Ostrozky) and his father, Kostiantyn. Janusz was the captain of Bila Tserkva, a castle and a Cossack stronghold south of Kyiv, while Kostiantyn, the palatine of Kyiv, “supervised” his son’s activities. The Ostroz- kys, father and son, had full control of the region. No one from the local nobility dared to defy the powerful princes, who were busy extending their possessions by taking over the lands of the petty nobility.

One of the noble victims of the Ostrozkys, Kryshtof Kosyn- sky (Krzysztof Kosinski), turned out to be a Cossack chieftain as well. When Janusz Ostrogski seized his land, which he held on the basis of a royal grant, Kosynsky did not waste time on a futile complaint to the king but gathered his Cossacks and attacked the Bila Tserkva castle, the headquarters of the younger Ostrozky. An attack by one noble on the holdings of another to resolve a con­flict over land was nothing unusual for the Commonwealth. It was unheard of, however, for a petty noble to assault a prince, and the Ostrozkys were caught by surprise. Soon the Cossacks were in control of another major fortress, this time on the Left Bank of the Dnieper—the city of Pereiaslav, whose princes had once ruled lands as far away as Moscow. Emboldened by these victories, Kosynsky marched westward to Volhynia, where he was finally defeated by a private army assembled by the Ostrozkys. Kosynsky suffered another defeat near Cherkasy, this time at the hands of another scion of Volhynia, Prince Oleksandr Vyshnevetsky.

The princes managed to put down the revolt without asking for help from the royal authorities. Ironically, the godfathers of the Cossacks punished their unruly children with the help of other Cossacks who were in their private service. By far the best known of Ostrozkys Cossack chieftains was Severyn Nalyvaiko. He came to Ostrih as a youth together with his brother, Demian, who became a member of Ostrozkys learned circle and a pub­lished author. Severyn, for his part, served the prince with his saber. He led the Ostrozky Cossacks into battle against Kosyn- sky’s army and then gathered dispersed Cossacks in the steppes of Podilia to lead them as far away as possible from the Ostroz- kys’ possessions. The destination to which Nalyvaiko took them was the Ottoman vassal state of Moldavia. Once the Cossacks returned from their Moldavian expedition, Ostrozky tried to use them to pillage the estates of his opponents in the struggle over the church union. Nalyvaiko’s Cossacks were spotted attacking the estates of the two Orthodox bishops who had traveled to Rome to petition for union with the Catholic Church. Attacks on other estates took the Cossacks to places as distant from the Ukrainian steppes as the lands of today’s Belarus.

There was, however, a limit to what the Ostrozkys could con­trol by manipulating the Cossack rebellion. The Cossacks elected their own commander, whom they followed into battle, but once the expedition was over, they were free to remove or even execute him if he acted against their interests. Then there were major divi­sions among the Cossacks themselves, which were not limited to registered versus unregistered men. The registered Cossacks were recruited from the landowning Cossack class, whose members resided in towns and settlements between Kyiv and Cherkasy. They had a chance to obtain special rights associated with roy­al service. But there was also another group, the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who had a fortified settlement called the Sich (after the wooden palisade that protected it) on the islands beyond the rapids. They were beyond the reach of royal officials, caused most of the trouble with the Crimean Tatars, and, in turbulent times, served as a magnet for the dissatisfied townsmen and peasants who fled to the steppes.

Nalyvaiko, charged by Ostrozky with managing the Cossack riffraff, soon found himself in an uneasy alliance with the unruly Zaporozhians. By 1596 he was no longer doing Ostrozkys bid­ding but acting on his own, leading a revolt greater than the one initiated by Kosynsky. The early 1590s saw a number of years of bad harvest, which caused famine. Starvation drove more peas­ants out of the noble estates and into Cossack ranks. This time the princely retinues were insufficient to suppress the uprising: the royal army was called in, headed by the commander of the Polish armed forces. In May 1596, the Polish army surrounded the Cossack encampment on the Left Bank of the Dnieper. The “old” or town Cossacks turned against the “new” ones and surrendered Nalyvaiko to the Poles in exchange for an amnesty. The princely servant turned Cossack rebel was executed in Warsaw, becoming a martyr for the Cossack and Orthodox causes in the eyes of the Cossack chroniclers.¹³

In the 1590s, the Cossacks entered into the foreign-policy calculations not only of the Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire but also of Central and West European powers. In 1594, Erich von Lassota, an emissary of the Holy Roman emperor, Rudolf II, visited the Zaporozhian Cossacks with a proposal to join his master’s war against the Ottomans. In the same year Aleksandar Komulovic (Alessandro Comuleo) delivered letters to the Cossacks from Pope Clement VIII urging them to join the European powers in the war against the Ottomans. Little came of those missions, apart from Komulovic’s letters and Lassota’s diary, which described the democratic order that prevailed in the Zaporozhian Host and enriched our knowledge of early Cossack history.¹⁴

Some scholars have suggested that Lassota or a member of his mission supplied Radvila and his cartographers with information on the Dnieper and the Cossacks. While this supposition seems far-fetched, there is little doubt that, with regard to the religious affiliation of the Cossacks, the makers of the Radvila map, Lasso- ta, and Komulovic shared the same position. They turned a blind eye to the division between Orthodox Cossacks and Catholic nobles, which was exacerbated by battles over the Union of Brest (1596). Instead, they treated the Cossacks as part of the common Christian bulwark against the Islamic threat presented by the Ottomans and their Crimean and Noghay subjects.

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Cossackdom was a rel­atively new political, cultural, and military phenomenon. Miracu­lously, it found its way onto a map that presented a princely view of Eastern Europe, oriented as much backward as forward. How did it happen? The answer lies in the political and economic in­terests of the Volhynian princes, who were busy expanding their possessions in the Dnieper region after the Union of Lublin. The princes and the Cossacks emerged as both partners and rivals in the colonization of the steppelands, defined on the Radvila map as “Volynia Ulterior,” “Ukraine,” or the “Lower Dnieper” area. The close relations between the two groups are reflected in the map references to Vyshnevetskys expedition to Khortytsia, while their conflict finds reflection in the mention of Pidkovas campaign against Moldavia and occasional Cossack attacks on their own homeland, which may be understood as indirect references to the revolts of Kryshtof Kosynsky and Severyn Nalyvaiko against the Ostrozky princes.

The Cossacks are presented on the map as warriors protecting the borderlands of the Commonwealth and claimed as members of the Polish state and the Christian world. The latter claim re­flects not so much the religious and ideological loyalties of the Cossacks as it does the hopes that the outside world invested in them in the face of growing confrontation with the Ottomans and their Crimean Tatar subjects. The Ottoman threat increased dramatically in the 1590s, as did the activities and revolts of the Cossacks, making them attractive allies in the eyes of Europe­an rulers involved in military confrontations with the Ottomans during the rise of Ahmed I (r. 1590-1617). As Lassota and Komu- lovic tried to recruit the Cossacks into the service of Catholic rulers, the Catholic bishop of Kyiv, Jozef Wereszczynski, penned a treatise arguing for the formation of Cossack regiments in the lands south of Ukraine to protect the Kingdom of Poland from Tatar attacks (1596). The rapid transformation of the Cossacks from Cimmerian or Muslim Circassians into Christian warriors, which took place in the imagination of European rulers and dip­lomats of the 1590s, found its visual reflection on the Radvila map created at the turn of the seventeenth century.