Ukrainians in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

In terms of both territory and population, the Ukrainian lands in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth formed a major part of what was the largest state in Europe. It is estimated – and one should bear in mind that statistics from this period are only rough estimations – that about 28% or about 2 million people of the Commonwealth’s population of 7.5 million were Ukrainians.

After 1569, when the last administrative traces of the old Rus’ principalities disappeared, the Ukrainian lands in the Commonwealth were divided into six provinces (wojewodstwa). Based on the incomplete data collected by the Polish historian Aleksander Jabłonowski, the size and population of these Ukrainian provinces is shown in table 1.¹

Map 11 The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

TABLE 1 Size and population of the Ukrainian provinces in the 16th century

Foreigners who traveled through Ukraine often remarked on its low density of population. While Polish lands, on the average, contained about twenty-two inhabitants per square kilometer, Ukrainian territories (with the exception of Pidliassia which lay closest to Poland) averaged about seven persons per square kilometer. Kiev, the largest Ukrainian province, was practically empty. This had not been the case at the outset of the Lithuanian period. In the early 1400s, when Grand Prince Vytautas’s expansionary drive reached the Black Sea, long lines of fortifications were built in the steppe to protect settlements that extended further south than in the times of Kievan Rus’. But as the Crimean Khanate grew stronger and Tatar raids increased, the sedentary population retreated northward until, in the late 1400s, the lower third of Ukraine was empty of sedentary settlements.