Warriors for the Faith

As late as the 1580s, the religious allegiance of the Cossacks remained in­definite and extremely obscure to outside observers. For a long time, many Western European and even some Polish authors of works about the Cossacks were not entirely certain whether they were Christians or Muslims.

Sigismund von Herberstein, the author of Rerum moscovitarum com- mentarii (1549), who obtained his information about the Ukrainian Cos­sacks during visits to Muscovy in 1517 and 1526, considered them to be Christians on the border of the Islamic world. But the French author of La Cosmographie universelle (1575), Andre Thevet, who made use of Her- berstein’s work, identified the Dnipro Cossacks with the Muslims living on the territory seized by the Crimean khan. The Descriptio veteris et novae Poloniae, published in Cracow in 1585, followed suit. Its author, Stanislaw Sarnicki, called the Cossacks ‘Cherkasians’ and considered them pre­dominantly Muslims. Even when actual Circassians entered the picture, confusion continued to reign. In a report of the 1580s written by an agent of the Warsaw nunciature, Carlo Gamberini, the Circassians, who were Sunni Muslims, were called followers of the Greek rite.^[163]

The doubts of foreign observers about the Cossacks’ adherence to Christianity first began to be dispelled as Cossack activity expanded be­yond the Ukrainian-Tatar steppe borderland and the Cossacks started to intervene actively in Moldavian affairs in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Their struggle with the Ottomans helped to establish their repu­tation as defenders of Christianity against the Islamic threat.

The view of the Cossacks as Christians and potential allies against the Ottomans and Muslims was also put forward in a report by the aforementioned Carlo Gamberini, an official of the papal nunciature in Warsaw. Although Gamberini did not indicate the Cossacks’ religion, it may be deduced from the text of his report that he considered them Christians. He wrote that the Cossack leader, with whom he became acquainted, was ready to take part in military action against the Turks ‘for the glory of God and the name of the Cossack people’.^[165] The Cossack leader encountered by Gamberini was most likely an Orthodox Christian, but it is not impossible that he was a member of the Polish Catholic nobility, which was well represented in Cossack ranks at the time.

In the 1590s, the Cossacks were also seen first and foremost as Chris­tian warriors by the papacy itself, as shown by the mission of a special envoy of Pope Clement VIII, the Croat Aleksandar Komulovic, to East­ern Europe. As discussed earlier, his mission was intended to establish an anti-Ottoman league, and, more practically, to seek allies in the struggle with the Ottomans and prepare specific actions against the Turks.

The Catholic bishop of Kyiv, Jozef Wereszczynski, also developed pro­posals for struggle against the Ottomans on the basis of Christian unity between Catholics and Orthodox. Wereszczynski was at least partly of Ruthenian descent and became known mainly as a publicist. He was the author of polemical broadsides known as turcicae that exhorted the Com­monwealth to combat the Ottomans, as well as of plans for the settlement of the Ukrainian steppes. As noted previously, Wereszczynski was the author of the first proposal for the establishment of an autonomous Cossack polity on the Left Bank of the Dnipro in order to help prevent Tatar attacks. Given that his projects were drafted and put forward while preparations for church unity were under way, Wereszczynski clearly did not doubt that the principle of Christian unity would prevail when it came to the struggle against the Ottomans.^[167]

Ivan Pidkova’s speech, recorded by Talducci, gives us some idea of the Cossacks’ own views on their relations with Christendom. Even con­sidering that Talducci’s report may have been influenced by models drawn from classical historiography, with its particular emphasis on the speeches of historical figures, his account of Pidkova’s last words, while not necessarily a verbatim transcript, undoubtedly reflected the range of ideas being debated in the Commonwealth in connection with Cossack activities.

By the end of the sixteenth century, Cossack allegiance to the Chris­tian world had been clearly declared by the Cossacks themselves and rec­ognized by Western Christianity in the context of joint resistance to the Ottoman and Muslim threat. But Cossackdom’s position on the division of Christianity between East and West, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, es­pecially its attitude to the initially hypothetical and then actual union of churches, remained a great unknown as the religious conflict in Ukraine grew more acute.

Cossacks into Orthodox Christians

How important was the religious element in the first Cossack movements that swept Ukraine in the late sixteenth century under the leadership of Kryshtof Kosynsky and Severyn Nalyvaiko? Eighteenth-century Ukrain­ian chroniclers and the anonymous author of the Istoriia Rusov (History of the Rus’), which was popular in the nineteenth century, unanimously stressed the role of religion, and of Orthodoxy in particular, as one of the motive forces of both insurrections. These views of the Cossack chronic­lers were effectively challenged and rejected by representatives of modern Ukrainian historiography, including the most prominent of them, Mykhailo Hrushevsky.

Hrushevsky also noted the accidental nature of the intervention in reli­gious affairs on the part of the rebels led by Nalyvaiko, an opinion gener­ally shared by present-day students of the first Cossack insurrections.^[169]

Indeed, we have no reliable information about any religious element in the first Cossack revolt under the leadership of Kryshtof Kosynsky (1591-3). Neither nationality and culture nor religion were serious factors in that revolt, nor could they have been, as religious identity remained rather indefinite and fluid among the Cossacks, given their isolation from prevailing forms of social organization in the settled area. In his poem ‘De bello Ostrogiano ad Piantcos cum Nisoviis' (‘On Ostrozky’s Battle at Piatka against the Lower Dnipro Cossacks’), which dealt with the events of the Kosynsky uprising and was commissioned by the princes Ostrozky, Szymon Pgkalski drew a sharp distinction between Cossackdom and Rus’ in matters of tradition and culture. While the poem reflected the views of the Ostrozky family, which tended to regard Cossackdom as its own un­ruly and rebellious offspring that required constant control, it also indi­cated the actual gap between the preoccupations of the Cossack stratum and the vital interests and aspirations of Ruthenian society.^[170]

The gap was, nevertheless, partly bridged in the course of the Naly- vaiko uprising (1594-6).

The first assault took place in 1595, when Terletsky’s servants were taken by surprise and robbed while transporting the bishop’s household goods from Cracow to Lutsk. At the beginning of 1596, Nalyvaiko’s units, accompanied by his brother, Demian (an Orthodox priest who belonged to the learned circle around Kostiantyn Ostrozky), pillaged the proper­ties of the brothers Kyryl and Iarosh Terletsky and seized valuables and documents that Kyryl had left for safekeeping in Pinsk. Other Cossack units subordinate to Hryhorii Loboda (who was also close to the Ostrozkys), again with Demian Nalyvaiko’s participation, attacked Semashko’s property. In addition to Demian Nalyvaiko, other, more obscure ‘servitors’ of Ostrozky were party to the attacks on the properties of Terletsky and Semashko.

There is little doubt that the attacks were carried out by Cossack units at the behest of Ostrozky, whose own properties remained almost un­touched by the Cossacks. Later, some of the property stolen from Se­mashko was identified among the belongings of Prince Ostrozky in Ostrih. Similarly, part of the booty from the attack on Terletsky’s prop­erty had made its way there. Ostrozky was evidently attempting to make use of a good opportunity to settle accounts with his enemies, and per­haps to force Terletsky to abandon his support for the church union. The assaults on Terletsky’s servants and property, as well as the pillage of goods that he had given to others for safekeeping, took place during the bishop’s trip to Rome. Since Terletsky was neither a great landholder nor a political opponent of Ostrozky’s, the religious motive for the attack on his properties looms largest.^[171]

What was in the minds of the Cossack leaders when they intervened in the religious struggle that was taking place in the settled area? A partial answer to this question was provided by Nalyvaiko himself. According to statements made by the Cossack leader during his imprisonment by the Poles, he came to Volhynia at the invitation of Kostiantyn Ostrozky, who requested his assistance in the religious issue. In particular, Nalyvaiko re­lated that while the Cossacks were in Moldavia, Ostrozky had sent a mes­senger to him ‘with the information that the king wanted to do violence to the religion of Rus’ and asking him whether he would not want to assist the Lord Palatine [Kostiantyn Ostrozky] and remain with him’.^[172] Even though Nalyvaiko’s testimony about Ostrozky’s role in involving the Cos­sacks in religious strife was wrung from him before his execution, its ver­acity can hardly be doubted, as Nalyvaiko had no particular reason to invent or append the religious factor to the history of his contacts with Ostrozky. Further corroboration of Nalyvaiko’s words may be seen in the fact that in August 1595, at the very time when Nalyvaiko and his forces were in Moldavia, and Ostrozky had evidently asked him to come to Vol- hynia, a letter was intercepted on its way from the old prince to the Protestants. In it, as mentioned in the previous chapter, Ostrozky threat­ened to come out against the king at the head of an army of 15,000 or even 20,000 if the church union were to be enacted without prior discussion at a sobor.1²

Nalyvaiko’s admission, especially his testimony that ‘if it had not come to that imbroglio [the religious conflict], then he wanted to retreat either to the fields and rivers, or to the Transylvanian prince, or beyond the Rapids’,^{[173] [174] supports the view—as do Cossack actions during the up­rising—that the Cossacks were more an instrument than an independent factor in the religious strife of 1595-6, with no religious agenda of their own. Available sources on the history of the Nalyvaiko revolt in Volhynia and Belarus show that the attacks on the properties of the brothers Ter- letsky and Semashko were merely insignificant episodes of a broader Cossack uprising. As Serhii Lepiavko, a student of the Cossack wars of the late sixteenth century, has noted, ‘for Nalyvaiko these were trifles indeed, incommensurate with his capacities’.[175] It would appear that Nalyvaiko sought to be of service to Ostrozky’s religious agenda mainly because of his long-standing close contacts with the prince and his entourage.}

Nevertheless, Cossack intervention in the religious conflict had a powerful effect on the way in which the struggle was perceived by con­temporaries. Soon after the enactment of the Union of Brest in 1596, one of its initiators, the Uniate bishop and later metropolitan Ipatii Potii, characterized his opponents in the Orthodox brotherhood of Vilnius as ‘Nalyvaiko’s horde’. Even though the reference was to the supporters of Severyn Nalyvaiko’s brother, the Reverend Demian Nalyvaiko, Potii’s expression clearly associated the Orthodox not only with the name of one of their priests but also with that of the leader of the Cossack uprising, who had been executed by the Poles. In time, the derogatory term nalyvaikivtsi (Nalyvaikoites) came to be applied to the Orthodox in general, associating nobiliary and burgher Orthodox circles entirely loyal to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with rebellion against the state and thereby serving to compromise the Orthodox opposition throughout the country. The use of the term began a tradition in which the first Cossack revolts became closely associated with the defense of the Orthodox faith.^[176]

The Jewish writer Nathan Hanover, who devoted his book Yeven Met- zulah (The Abyss of Despair) to describing the destruction of the Jews in the Khmelnytsky Uprising, also linked the genesis of religious conflict in Ukraine with Nalyvaiko’s revolt. Hanover began his account of the perse­cution of the Jews in Ukraine with that revolt, and, even though he cited no instance of anti-Jewish actions on the part of the rebels, he provided an interesting example of the way in which the uprising was perceived in the historical memory of the time. According to Hanover, the Cossack re­volts were caused by the persecution of the Orthodox in the times of Zyg- munt III; he referred to Nalyvaiko himself as a Greek (Orthodox) priest who roused his people to struggle against Polish oppression.^[177] In all like­lihood, the Jewish tradition recorded by Hanover was based on a confusion between Severyn Nalyvaiko and his brother, Demian. Most interesting in this connection, however, is the association of Severyn Nalyvaiko in the consciousness of non-Ukrainians not only with the Cossack revolt but also with the struggle of the Orthodox to secure their rights.

In the late sixteenth century, Cossackdom entered the religious strug­gle on the side and at the behest of a representative of the princely stra­tum, Kostiantyn Ostrozky, the long-time patron of steppe Cossackdom. Paradoxically, the Cossacks’ return to the sphere of religious struggle was related to the death of Prince Ostrozky. The old prince passed away in 1608, and in 1610 the Cossacks entered their first protestation in defense of Orthodoxy in the record-books of the Kyiv castle court. These two events were linked in that the Cossack protestation was a reaction to the advance of the Union in the Kyiv region: after Ostrozky’s death, the Catholic Stanisiaw Zoikiewski was appointed to take his place as palatine of Kyiv, and the Uniate metropolitan, Ipatii Potii, made great efforts at the time to secure his position in Kyiv. Under these circumstances Cos- sackdom joined other Orthodox forces to repel the Uniate offensive.

A direct stimulus to the intensification of religious conflict in Kyiv was an initiative taken by Potii’s vicar, the Reverend Antonii Hrekovych, whom the metropolitan dispatched to Kyiv in January 1610. Hrekovych attempted to convert the Kyivan Orthodox clergy to the Union by means of pressure and threats. In March 16i0, he summoned the Orthodox cler­gymen to a joint service at St Sophia’s Cathedral on the Sunday of Ortho­doxy, but they refused to go, and, judging by Hrekovych’s subsequent complaints, also persuaded the laity not to attend, spreading rumors to the effect that all participants would be baptized into the ‘Polish faith’. The rumors must have fallen on fertile ground, since by that time Kyivans had undoubtedly heard of the events that had taken place in Vilnius in the summer of 1609, when Potii, with the help of government forces, subor­dinated the local Orthodox churches to his authority.

According to Hrekovych’s protestation, during the conflict of 7-9 March the Orthodox clergy persuaded the Cossacks, led by Ivan and Petro (of whom nothing further is known), not to let anyone into St Sophia’s Cathedral. The Cossacks allegedly threatened those who were preparing to attend the service, as well as Hrekovych himself.^[178]

Subsequently the Orthodox clergymen of Kyiv denied that they had incited the Cossacks, and the Cossacks themselves, in their protestation in the Kyiv castle court records, rejected the allegation that they had threatened Hrekovych. By all accounts, however, Hrekovych was correct as to the role of the Orthodox clergy in the incident and the threats issued by the Cossacks. This is corroborated by a letter of May 1610 from Het­man Hryhorii Tyskynevych to the deputy palatine of Kyiv, the Orthodox Mykhailo Myshka-Kholonevsky, in which the hetman noted that he had given the Cossacks permission to kill Hrekovych ‘like a dog upon en­countering him’ unless he put an end to the persecution of the Orthodox. Somewhat later, there was indeed an attempt on Hrekovych’s life by one of the Cossacks.^[179]

The question of which side to take in the acute religious conflict, if it occurred to the Cossacks at all, was probably more theoretical than prac­tical. As a newly emerging social stratum, Cossackdom was fighting for its rights against the ruling authorities and could count on understanding and support only from the church that stood in opposition to the govern­ment and was being hounded by it. The Uniates, wholly dependent on royal authority and loyal to it, were completely unsuited to such a role and, no less important, would scarcely have agreed to take it on. An im­portant factor contributing to the Cossacks’ choice was that in the early seventeenth century their native borderlands became a refuge for the Orthodox clergy that was being driven out of western Ukraine. The two opposition groups were brought together and protected from the government by the distance of the Dnipro region from the main centers of Polish rule.

In its struggle against the advance of the Union, the Orthodox clergy had long and successfully availed itself of the support of the Orthodox no­bility and townsmen, even before the Union was concluded. In Kyiv, dur­ing the struggle with Hrekovych, the Orthodox clergy also mobilized the support of the nobility and the burghers, but here the local Ukrainian Cossacks—an element almost completely absent in the other ‘hot spots’ of religious strife ensuing upon the Union of Brest—also quite naturally became a target of their propaganda. Cossackdom responded eagerly to the summons and joined the traditional protectors of Orthodoxy. The protestation that the Cossacks, led by the ‘renowned’ Hryhorii Sereda, entered in the records of the Kyiv castle court concerning the ‘Hrekovych affair’ of 1610 included the following comment on the matter:

Like their Graces the princes, the lords, the dignitaries, the knightly order, the nobility, and the Christian populace... of the lands, counties and palatinate of Kyiv, standing unshakably by the traditional Ortho[dox] religion and by the persons of the clergy... we, too, as sons of the universal apostolic Eastern Church... protest.^[180]

The Kyivan events of 1610 are the first known instance of Cossack- dom’s active intervention in the religious struggle in Ukraine, as well as an indication of the Cossacks’ orientation in that struggle. In Kyiv, the Cossacks intervened in the religious struggle no longer out of any desire to be of service to their late patron, Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky, as in the times of Nalyvaiko, but on the basis of their own interests and calcula­tions. The occasion of Cossack intervention in the religious conflict is also quite significant, given that the Cossack protestation was drafted in the name of the companions of the Zaporozhian Host, who were then en­gaged in the war with Muscovy. This feature of the protestation indicates that the Cossacks became involved in religious strife at a time when the government depended on their loyalty as never before, and when it was least likely to undertake any repressions against them.

The Kyivan events were not an isolated episode, but reflected the broader Cossack practice of taking part in religious life in general. In their protestation of 1610, the Cossacks asserted that as sons of the Eastern Church, they looked after houses of divine worship, supported them, and enhanced them with decorations. This was no invention, if only because of the enrollment of the Zaporozhian Host, headed by Hetman Petro Sahaidachny, in the Kyiv Orthodox Brotherhood, which was established toward the end of 1615 by the local nobility and burghers.^[181] An important indication of the Cossacks’ serious and lasting interest in religious affairs was the established fact of Cossack patronage of the Trakhtemyriv Monastery. According to documents dating from i6i8, the hetman, the colonels, and the whole Host acted as founders and donors to the monastery. In i6i8, the threat posed by the Cossacks obliged the Com­monwealth Diet to devote at least cursory attention to the issue of ac­commodating the ‘Greek religion’. This was the first such instance since the events of 1609 in Vilnius and the first debate on the religious question occasioned not by the actions of nobles or townsmen, but of Ukrainian Cossackdom in particular.^[182]

In i6i8, the Cossacks finally did away with their old enemy, Antonii Hrekovych, who was seized at his home and drowned in the Dnipro near the Vydubychi Monastery. This action was prompted by Hrekovych’s at­tempt to take St Michael’s Monastery from the Orthodox.^[183] The murder of Hrekovych was only one link in a long chain of terrorist actions that began with attempts on the life of Potii in Vilnius in 1609 and ended with the murder of the Uniate archbishop of Polatsk, Iosafat Kuntsevych, by burghers in Vitsebsk in 1623. These acts were undertaken by the Ortho­dox as the weaker party, striving to ward off the advance of the officially sponsored Union. It would be difficult to exaggerate the leading role of the armed and irrepressible Cossacks in this growing intensification of violence: even the burghers of Vitsebsk, who were cruelly punished after the murder of Kuntsevych, counted on help and deliverance from them.^[184]

Cossackdom served the Orthodox party mainly in a capacity in which all the other traditional supporters of the ‘Eastern’ Church—the princes, nobility, and burghers—were either ineffective or completely helpless. It gave the persecuted church its armed support, which counted no less than Diet resolutions and royal proclamations in a Commonwealth cor­rupted by princely and nobiliary license. With the help of the Cossacks, the Orthodox, at least in the borderlands, could counter force with force and violence with violence in response to the official persecution insti­tuted against them at the initiative of their Uniate opponents.^[185] The mili­tary protection offered by the Cossacks safeguarded the Orthodox clergy in the Dnipro region from otherwise inevitable oppression by the author­ities, but also pushed the confrontation between Orthodox and Uniates toward sanguinary escalation.

Which of the groups in the Cossack milieu were responsible for initiating Cossack intervention in the religious conflict of the 1610s? Un­fortunately, we know too little about the events to answer this question fully. Nevertheless, the limited data available today support the assump­tion that it was the better-off elements within Cossackdom that sup­ported intervention in religious strife. In the first place, the fact that these developments occurred in Kyiv makes it possible to assume the partici­pation of Cossackized nobles and Cossacks who had established them­selves in the settled area. Secondly, the arguments employed in the Cossack protestation, as shown by the extract cited above, announced the solidarity of Cossackdom with the ruling stratum in Rus’. Another im­portant aspect of the events of 1610 was the support given to the protes­tation by Hetman Tyskynevych, a representative of the Cossack upper stratum.

Having raised the banner of the defense of Orthodoxy, the Cossacks were clearing the way for themselves to enter the ‘club’ of the traditional Ruthenian social elite—the princes and the nobility—which had been engaged in active struggle against church union since the late sixteenth century. The defense of the Orthodox Church and the Cossacks’ participation in it were a potential and, in time, an actual admission ticket to that exclusive social ‘club’.^[186] The Orthodox clergy had already begun to employ the Cossacks to serve its interests, but did not yet dare to admit to any connection with that rebellious element, tolerated but dis­credited in the eyes of the government. In this respect, the situation had changed little since the times of Nalyvaiko: the opponents of the Union made use of the Cossacks’ services to put pressure on their antagonists (who in turn relied on the power of the government and its forces), but did so in a clandestine manner, making no acknowledgment of their ties with the Cossacks.

The Restoration of the Orthodox Metropolitanate

The situation changed at the beginning of the 1620s, when the Cossacks actively involved themselves in the restoration of the Orthodox hierarchy. Their role in the consecration of Orthodox bishops by Patriarch Theo­phanes of Jerusalem in the autumn of 1620 is one of the most thoroughly researched subjects in the history of the Kyivan metropolitanate, yet it remains one of the most controversial.^[187]

Traditional Ukrainian historiography, which stressed the role of Cos- sackdom in the consecration and regarded the Cossacks primarily as de­fenders of the Orthodox Church and faith, was severely criticized in the last decades of the nineteenth century by Panteleimon Kulish, who con­sidered that the initiative for the consecration came from Muscovy and that the Cossacks were simply drawn into the matter by the Kyivan clergy. Mykhailo Hrushevsky partly shared Kulish’s skepticism when it came to the early Cossacks’ level of religiosity, but rejected his hypothesis that the consecration was inspired by Muscovy. Hrushevsky accepted the argu­ments of the newly consecrated hierarchs themselves, who noted in their protestation of 1621 that the Cossacks had long been supporters of the Orthodox Church and had facilitated the consecration on their own ini­tiative, not at the clergy’s behest. In the 1930s, the Polish historian Kazi­mierz Chodynicki attempted to develop Kulish’s ideas, but his research, like Kulish’s own work, was based almost entirely on speculation, as well as on the extrapolation of the religious and political influence and signifi­cance of Muscovy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the events of the early seventeenth century. Kulish and Chodynicki regarded the Cossacks primarily as freebooters incapable of and uninterested in any intervention in higher church policy.^[188]

What actually transpired in Ukraine in the autumn of 1620, and what was the role of the Cossacks in the consecration of the new Orthodox hierarchy? The very act of consecration is linked with the presence on Ukrainian territory of Patriarch Theophanes of Jerusalem. In 1618, he traversed the Crimean Khanate on his way to Muscovy, where in the fol­lowing year he consecrated Filaret (Romanov), the father of Tsar Mikhail, as patriarch of Moscow. In early February 1620, he was still in Moscow, where a Cossack mission was also present, but there is no reli­able information about any contacts between Theophanes and the Cos­sacks at the time. In March of the same year, Theophanes stopped in Ukraine on his way back from Moscow: his hosts in Kyiv were the mem­bers of the Orthodox Brotherhood and the monks of the Cave Monastery. The Commonwealth government suspected Theophanes of being a spy for the Turks and an agent of Moscow, hence the patriarch, who naturally feared arrest, restricted himself to the territory controlled by the Cos­sacks. He visited towns in the vicinity of Kyiv (Bila Tserkva, Trakhtemy- riv, and Mezhyhiria) and received delegations from brotherhoods throughout Rus’, to which he freely issued stauropigial charters.^[189]

Up to a point, the patriarch’s activity did not differ too much from that of other Eastern hierarchs, who generally came to Ukraine to collect ‘alms’.^[190] In time, though, the situation changed as the local Orthodox began demanding that Theophanes assist them in settling their ecclesias­tical affairs. On 13 August 1620, Theophanes addressed an appeal to the faithful of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to elect a bishop for themselves, but consecration scarcely entered into the patriarch’s initial plans.^[191] In October, under the supervision of the royal attendant Szczgsny Poczanowski, Theophanes left Kyiv and was sup­posed to make his way to Kamianets, and then across the border to Mol­davia. Only an unforeseen development prevented the further progress of the patriarch and allowed him to return to Kyiv: in Bila Tserkva, the patriarch’s escort was apprised of the unsuccessful course of the Battle of TTutora, and Poczanowski was obliged to leave the patriarch there in the care of the Cossack colonel Bohdan Kyzym, while he himself hastened to the king.³¹

Thus Theophanes returned to Kyiv with a Cossack escort, and there the actual consecration of the new Orthodox hierarchy took place.³² Given his fear of the Commonwealth authorities, Theophanes probably did not want to perform the consecration, but the petitioners, most not­ably the Cossacks, insisted that he do so. The sources available today em­phasize the special role of the Cossacks in negotiations with the patriarch. There is even reason to believe that the Cossacks had recourse to a kind of blackmail. In a protestation written by Iov Boretsky and other Orthodox hierarchs in 1621 that discussed their consecration by Theophanes, the arguments of the Cossack ‘knightly men’ are rendered as follows:

³¹ See P. N. Zhukovich, ‘Protestatsiia mitropolita Iova Boretskogo i drugikh zapadno- russkikh ierarkhov, sostavlennaia 28 aprelia 1621 goda’, Stat’i po Slavianovedeniiu (St Peters­burg), ed. V. I. Lamanskii, vyp. 3 (1910): 141.

³² See the text of the chronicle of the Hustynia Monastery in ChOIDR 8 (1848): bk. 4, Mater- ialy otechestvennye, pp. 1-38. For interpretations of these events, see Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus', 7: 338-41; Chodynicki, KosciolPrawoslawny, pp. 427-30.

The chronicle of the Hustynia Monastery asserts that the consecration of the hierarchy took place ‘with the advice of many and pious lords of noble birth and all the common Christians, and particularly of the hetman of the Zaporozhian Host, Petro Sahaidachny'. In his account of those present at the deliberations, the chronicler mentions all the more important regions of Ukraine and adds the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Hrushevsky refers to the council as a ‘Ukrainian na­tional congress’, but more probably this represents an effort on the part of the chronicler to lend retrospective legitimacy to the consecration in Kyiv. Tradition required that the bishop of Pere- myshl, for example, first be elected by the Peremyshl nobility. As the Reverend Obornicki, a wit­ness to the Cossack council at Sukha Dibrova in June 1621, later wrote—probably quite accurately—Iezekyil Kurtsevych, the hegumen of the Cossack monastery at Trakhtemyriv, was elected bishop by the Cossacks. As we know, he was appointed to the Volodymyr eparchy upon his election (see Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus’, 7: 338-9, 357-8).

Given the accusations that the new hierarchy was illegitimate because the bishops had not been elected by the nobility and nominated by the king, the references to the council in the chronicle of the Hustynia Monastery and in Smotrytsky’s Verification of Innocence (Vilnius, 1621) were intended to show, besides all else, that the hierarchy was indeed legitimate, if only because the tradition of the nobiliary election of bishops had been upheld. Metropolitan Boretsky also mentioned the ‘all-Rus’’ election of the new bishops in his letter of 8 May 1621 to Prince Krzysztof Radziwill, noting that the patriarch had consecrated ‘to the metropolitanate and the bishoprics persons chosen by all of Rus’ and recommended to him’ (Iu. A. Mytsyk, ‘Iz lystuvan- nia ukrai'ns’kykh pys’mennykiv-polemistiv 1621-1624 rokiv’, ZNTSh 225 [1993]: 318).

Another important matter touching upon the legitimacy of the newly consecrated hierarchy was the questioning by the government and the Uniates of the right of Patriarch Theophanes to consecrate bishops outside the canonical territory of the patriarchate of Jerusalem. The Ortho­dox continually stressed that Theophanes had appropriate authorization from Constantinople. Boretsky, in his protestation of 1621, while referring to the patriarch of Constantinople as the ‘pastor of all Rus’ ’, also developed the notion of the joint jurisdiction of the Eastern patriarchs over Rus’. He referred particularly to ‘Theophanes, the patriarch of Jerusalem, one of the ecu­menical pastors and teachers of this Rus’, who with his colleagues, the three patriarchs, has long had and continues to have dominance and authority over this nation as his sheep’ (for the text of this variant of the protestation, see Mytsyk, ‘Iz lystuvannia’, p. 328).

You would not be a patriarch; you would not be a good pastor; you would not be the vicar of Christ and the apostles if Your Holiness did not consecrate a metro­politan and bishops for the nation of Rus', especially when you have found us hounded and without pastors, and we even fear (they said) lest some fierce ani­mal kill you in the course of this journey in the name of Christ.^[192]

A simple denial of Cossack protection to the patriarch would most likely have resulted in his arrest. Forced to choose, Theophanes chose in favor of the Cossacks.

As mentioned earlier, in Kyiv, Theophanes consecrated the former rec­tor of the Kyiv Brotherhood School, Iov Boretsky, as metropolitan, as well as two bishops: Meletii Smotrytsky, who was a rector of the school at some point, and Isaia Kopynsky, the hegumen of the Kyiv Brotherhood Monastery. After leaving Kyiv, Theophanes consecrated three more bishops. Hegumen Iezekyil (Iosyf) Kurtsevych was consecrated in Trakhtemyriv, Hegumen Isaakii Boryskovych in Bila Tserkva, and Hegu- men Paisii Ipolytovych in Zhyvotiv. A Cossack unit led by Sahaidachny then escorted Theophanes to the Moldavian border. Before crossing it, Theophanes blessed the Cossacks for war with the Ottoman Empire, called on them to defend the Orthodox faith, and absolved them of their partici­pation in the war with Orthodox Muscovy.^[193]

Such were the facts of Cossack involvement in the consecration of the new Orthodox hierarchy. But who exactly instigated the involvement of the Cossacks in these events? Was it Patriarch Theophanes, the Mus­covite court, or one of the Cossacks' own leaders, either Petro Kona- shevych-Sahaidachny or his rival, and hetman at the time of the consecrations, Iakiv Borodavka?^[194] All that can be said with certainty is that, given the behavior and vacillation of Patriarch Theophanes, the ini­tiative did not come from him, nor was it Muscovy that chose to act through him in the matter. The consecration of individuals closely associated either with the brotherhood movement (such as Boretsky, Smotrytsky, and Kopynsky) or directly with the Cossacks (such as Kurt- sevych) indicates that the leading role in the whole affair was played by the Kyiv Brotherhood, whose strength was based on Cossack member­ship and support.

In 1620, as in the previous Kyivan developments of 1610, Cossackdom was the most radical and decisive force whose military strength ensured the success of the enterprise. Cossackdom was, of course, ‘agitated’ and drawn into the religious struggle, but this was done long before 1620, and by no means against its will. Iov Boretsky and the other newly conse­crated hierarchs noted quite correctly in their protestation of 1621 that the Cossacks were well informed about the persecution of the Orthodox in Rus’, since representatives ‘of various counties, towns and villages’ were rallying to them. Nor is there any reason to doubt the story, re­counted by Boretsky, that when the Roman Catholic bishop of Kyiv made his way to the altar of the Cave Monastery church, this was discussed at a Cossack council in Zaporizhia and aroused protest from the Cossacks.^[195] There is also a report that at the Cossack council of 29 July 1619, where a sharp dispute took place between Sahaidachny and Borodavka (the het- mancy went to Sahaidachny), the Cossacks resolved to stand ‘by the an­cient faith’.^[196]

Despite internecine conflicts and the struggle for the Cossack leader­ship between Borodavka and Sahaidachny, there was a general consensus among the Cossacks on their intervention in religious strife in defense of the ‘Greek faith’. Letters from Iakiv Borodavka recently published by Iurii Mytsyk confirm the hetman’s direct involvement in the consecration of the new hierarchy. In a letter dispatched to the king from Zaporizhia in March 1621 (at that time, Sahaidachny would still have been with the patriarch), Borodavka, referring to the Cossacks’ military accomplish­ments, asked the king to issue a privilege confirming the traditional rights of the ‘ancient Greek religion’ and ‘of our clergy’.^[197] Instructions dated March 1621 from the Zaporozhian Host (in fact, issued by Borodavka) to Cossack envoys to the king enjoined them to press for the recognition of the newly consecrated hierarchy.^[198]

In April 1621, Borodavka visited Metropolitan Iov Boretsky in Kyiv and met with the archpriest of Slutsk, Andrii Muzhylovsky, who brought news to Kyiv about the official persecution of the Vilnius townsmen. Borodavka wrote a letter in their defense to the leader of the Lithuanian Calvinists, the Lithuanian Field Hetman Krzysztof Radziwifi, noting that ‘with God as its help, the whole Host will probably wish to come out against those traitors and turncoats, the Uniates'.^[199] Even Boretsky's protestation, while emphasizing Sahaidachny's part in the whole under­taking, still notes that he acted on the instructions of the whole Za- porozhian Host.^[200] The protestation also mentions that the royal attendant Poczanowski entrusted Theophanes to the care of the Cossack colonel Bohdan Kyzym in Bila Tserkva. This serves to indicate that pro­tection was extended to the patriarch not only by Sahaidachny, but by other colonels as well, which would hardly have been possible without the hetman's approval or, indeed, the support of the whole Host.

If in fact the Cossacks undertook to provide security for the consecration of the new hierarchy upon learning of the rout at TTutora, calculating that the government would forgive them anything in the face of the military threat, then they were not mistaken. The Commonwealth was indeed frightened and disoriented by the defeat at Tutora. A new war with the Ottomans was inevitable, and the king needed the immediate assistance of the Cossack Host to stop the Ottoman army at the borders of the Com­monwealth. As early as the autumn of 1620, there was an overture from Warsaw for Cossack support, but Hetman Borodavka declined to mobil­ize the Host, claiming that he had received the king’s letter too late and indicating that the winter season was inopportune for a military exped­ition. The king sought to avoid a conflict with the Cossacks over the issue.^[201] There was even an effort to exploit Patriarch Theophanes, who would later be accused of espionage on behalf of the sultan, to influence the Cossacks. Demands were made on him to bless the Cossacks for war with the Ottomans, which he did before leaving Ukraine. When rumors of the consecration reached Warsaw, the king issued proclamations only against the patriarch and the new hierarchs, forbidding their accession to their designated eparchies. The Cossacks, at least in formal terms, re­mained ‘above suspicion’ for the time being.^[202] Not only the royal admin­istration but also the incendiary Uniate polemicists made an effort to avoid provoking them.

The Orthodox side, on the contrary, exploited Cossack support as much as possible in order to legitimize the new hierarchy. Boretsky’s protestation, which was drafted by the Kyivan clergy in response to the assault on the burghers of Vilnius and the accusations of espionage against them and Patriarch Theophanes, took account of several circum­stances in its discussion of Cossackdom. Firstly, having just taken part in the campaign against Muscovy and being well known for their anti­Turkish orientation, the Cossacks were a convenient shield against accusations of espionage on behalf of Muscovy or the Ottomans. Sec­ondly, it was important for Boretsky to respond to Uniate accusations that it was in fact he and other hierarchs who were inciting the Cossacks to actions against the state and to revolt. Boretsky’s line of defense here was quite simple: he maintained that the Cossacks needed no agitation on the part of the clergy, since these ‘knightly men’ were themselves ardent defenders of Orthodoxy and had belonged to the ‘nation of Rus’’ since the times of the Old Rus’ princes Oleh, Iaroslav, and Volodymyr.^[203]

The clear danger posed to the government by the newly forged alliance between the Orthodox hierarchy and its Cossack supporters was mani­fested at a Cossack council that took place at Sukha Dibrova near Fastiv in mid-June 1621. More than 300 clergymen, headed by Metropolitan Boretsky and Bishop Kurtsevych of Volodymyr, came to take part in the council immediately after the completion of their own sobor. More than 50,000 veteran Cossacks and Cossackized peasants and burghers, led by Borodavka and Sahaidachny, also gathered there. Iov Boretsky, who was given the opportunity to speak on the first day, delivered an impassioned address setting forth all his grievances against the royal administration and condemning the persecution of the Orthodox in Vilnius and else­where. He was followed by Petro Sahaidachny, who read out a letter from Patriarch Theophanes. The Cossacks adopted the cause of the new hier­archy as their own, and participants in the council vowed to defend the ‘Greek faith’ to the death.⁴⁵

The atmosphere at the council was rather bellicose and overtly hostile to the government. The Cossacks agreed to defend the Commonwealth in a new war with the Ottomans, but only if their demands were fulfilled, and one of their principal conditions was the accommodation of the ‘Greek religion’ and the recognition of the new hierarchy. The significance of the religious element in the new Cossack policy toward the government was also reflected in the composition of the Cossack delegation that was dispatched to the king from the council. It was headed by Sahaidachny as the representative of the Cossacks, while the clergy was represented by the former hegumen of the Cossack monastery of Trakhtemyriv, who was now the bishop of Volodymyr—Iezekyil Kurtsevych. From a letter written by one of the supporters of the new hierarchy, the Slutsk archpriest Andrii Muzhylovsky, it emerges that the Orthodox clergy was apprehensive lest the royal courtiers force the Cossack delegation to abandon its religious demands or twist it around their fingers, but placed its confidence in ‘those who were the reason and the guides to that deliverance of ours’,⁴⁶ who were members of the delegation.

to their faith by fighting the infidels and freeing other Christians from Turkish and Tatar captiv­ity, as well as by supporting individual churches and making donations to their benefit. Charac­teristically, in 1621 as in 1610 the Orthodox clergy utterly rejected accusations that it was inciting the Cossacks to rebellion. (Compare the texts of the two protestations: Zhukovich, ‘Protestat- siia’, p. 149; Akty IuZR, vol. 2 [1865]: 59.)

⁴⁵ Hrushevsky (History of Ukraine-Rus’, 7: 358-9) describes the Cossack council held at Sukha Dibrova on 15-17 June 1621 on the basis of a letter by the Reverend Obornicki, a Catholic priest. Iov Boretsky informed Krzysztof Radziwill of the same council in a letter of 14 (24) June 1621. According to Boretsky, the council took place at Kaharlyk ‘about two weeks ago’, ending on 17 June. There were 50,600 Cossacks registered at the council. See the text of the letter in Mytsyk, ‘Iz lystuvannia’, pp. 319-22.

⁴⁶ See the text of Andrii Muzhylovsky’s letter of 5 (15) July 1621 to Krzysztof Radziwill in Mytsyk, ‘Iz lystuvannia’, p. 324.

To indicate that they did not take the delegation lightly and were pre­pared to press their demands with sword in hand, the Cossacks resorted to their usual methods. Instead of proceeding through the steppe to join forces with the main Commonwealth armies at Bilhorod and Tighina, as the Commonwealth administration required them to do, the Cossacks set out for the settled area. At Bila Tserkva, they manifested their reli­giosity by carrying out the first known Jewish pogrom in Cossack history. Advancing along an extended front from the Prypiat River in the north to Bar and Kamianets in the south (that is, taking almost all of present-day Ukraine into their ‘net’), they intended to proceed all the way to Lutsk, there to await the return of their delegation from the royal court.^[204] The Catholic priest Obornicki, who was present at the council of Sukha Di- brova and felt the power of the uncontrolled Cossack element, warned of the threat of a peasant war that he discerned behind the scenes of the re­ligious conflict: ‘Protect, O God, the Catholics of this land, weak and few in number! There is nowhere to flee; everyone has abandoned us.’^[205]

As the reception of the delegation led by Sahaidachny and Kurtsevych showed, the royal administration, seeking to win over the Cossacks, pre­ferred to turn a blind eye to their ‘escapades’. Even so, it was not prepared to sacrifice the Union or recognize the new hierarchy. From the incom­plete data that have survived about the reception of the Cossack delega­tion, it develops that the measures outlined in the royal proclamations against the newly consecrated bishops were stayed when Kurtsevych apologized to the king for the violation of the royal right of patronage.^[206] The prospects for an understanding seemed rather encouraging, and Sa- haidachny was satisfied with the results of the mission, but the promises of the royal administration were given only under duress, and the author­ities did not consider themselves bound by them.

In the autumn of 1621, immediately after victory was secured at Kho­tyn, the administration renewed its struggle with the newly consecrated hierarchy. Although the Cossacks attempted to restate their previous de­mands, including the religious ones, after the Khotyn War, to all intents and purposes the opportunity was lost. The new Cossack demands were drafted in the steppe near Khotyn, far from Kyiv and Metropolitan Boret­sky, hence they were more reminiscent of traditional Cossack petitions than of the ardently religious resolutions of the council of Sukha Dibrova. The Cossacks' principal demands were to increase the allowance for their maintenance and to restore the privileges of which they had earlier been deprived. As for religion, it was mentioned in the context of Cossack ser­vices to Christianity in their war with the infidels, a traditional motif since the days of Pidkova. The Cossack petitions were termed ‘requests in view of the sanguinary services renowned throughout Christendom and ap­parent to all infidels'. The authors of the document, like Kasiian Sakovych in his Verses, which appeared the following year, emphasized their merits in the struggle ‘for the Christian faith, for the royal honor, for the integrity of our fatherland', but demands of a religious nature were formulated in a very general and indefinite manner. They amounted only to the accommodation of the ‘Greek religion' and the preservation of lib­erties previously granted.^[207]

From the viewpoint of the hierarchy, which wanted to be recognized by the royal administration at any price, the formulation of the new Cossack demands meant that Andrii Muzhylovsky's fears, expressed in the imme­diate aftermath of the council of Sukha Dibrova, had come true: the Cos­sacks had let themselves be swindled after all.^[208] First the delegation led by Sahaidachny and Kurtsevych had contented itself with promises of a gen­eral nature from the king, and then, removed from the metropolitan's in­fluence and control, the whole Cossack Host had almost entirely neglected the religious issue in its petition. Moreover, the Khotyn peti­tion was addressed not to the king but to Royal Prince Wladyslaw and Hetman Stanislaw Koniecpolski, entreating them to present it to the king. The king, for his part, also gave no direct response to the Cossack demands, but included his reply in instructions to the commissioners who were to be dispatched to the Cossacks. According to the king's in­structions, the issue of the hierarchy remained, at least officially, beyond the scope of the Cossack-Polish negotiations that followed the Khotyn War. The document stated that just as no one had earlier persecuted the Cossacks because of their religion, so no one would do so in the future. The main problem that preoccupied the government was no longer how to mobilize the Cossacks and win them over, but how to get rid of them and disperse them as quickly as possible, since the Commonwealth had no money to pay for their services.^[209]

Although the Khotyn petition marked a serious setback for Boretsky’s struggle to maintain control over Cossack relations with the government, it proved temporary. After Khotyn, when most of the Cossack demands were left unfulfilled, the Cossacks returned to the Dnipro region in a mood of anger with the king and the administration, which made them highly susceptible to the propaganda of the Orthodox hierarchy. As early as February 1622, a new delegation was sent to the king, and its instruc­tions included the broadest representation of the religious issue. These instructions demanded the abolition of the Union and spoke of the ac­commodation of the Orthodox religion not only with respect to the Cos­sacks, but to Rus’ as a whole.^[210] This was a direct response to the attempt made in the royal instructions issued after Khotyn to limit the religious issue to the Cossacks alone. Boretsky’s influence on the Cossacks was thus renewed, and Cossackdom itself took on the role of Orthodox bat­tering ram at subsequent Diets.

Prior to the Diet of 1623, a large Cossack council was held near Kyiv at which the Cossacks confirmed the determination they had earlier ex­pressed to fight for the abolition of the Union. The instructions to the Cossack envoys to the Diet generally repeated the points of the Cossack petition submitted after the Khotyn War. Nevertheless, the proximity and influence of the Kyivan clergy were apparent in the prominence given to the religious issue, as well as in the demands (accompanying the ultim­ate desideratum of the abolition of the Union) for the annullment of the king’s proclamations against the Orthodox hierarchs and their de facto recognition by the royal administration. The text of the Cossack de­mands also included a petition for a royal privilege legalizing the activity of the Kyiv Brotherhood School.^[211] The claims put forward by the Cos­sack envoys on the religious issue, as well as their threats that a failure to accommodate the ‘Greek religion’ might lead to a Cossack rebellion, forced the authorities to establish a commission of senators and Diet delegates to reconcile the Orthodox with the Uniates, but no progress was made on the issue of recognition of the Orthodox hierarchy.^[212]

The refusal of the Diet of 1623 to respond positively to the issue of le­galizing the new Orthodox hierarchy, as well as the increasingly negative attitude of the authorities to the demands of the Orthodox after the mur­der of the Uniate archbishop Iosafat Kuntsevych by the burghers of Vit- sebsk, created an atmosphere of despair in Kyiv and led Orthodox circles to abandon hope of a positive official resolution of their grievances.^[213] The archpriest of Slutsk, Andrii Muzhylovsky, who came to Kyiv at the behest of his Protestant patron, Krzysztof Radziwill, to promote a united front of Orthodox and Protestants at the subsequent Diet of 1625, wrote in Feb­ruary 1624 that among the Kyivan clergy, with the exception of Metro­politan Boretsky, he met only ‘somnolent people’ who ‘approved a declaration not to send anything to the current Diet and not to be present themselves’. The Cossacks from whom Muzhylovsky solicited letters to the Diet also ‘did not want to send anything to the Diet, saying that we would never achieve anything there; that we have long been plied with promises, but with no result’.^[214] Still, the Cossacks decided at the last minute to send a delegation to the Diet of 1625 in view of the change in their policy toward the Crimea. Demands of a religious nature were even­tually added to its instructions only because Iov Boretsky managed to intercept the delegation on its way to the Diet. Thus, besides the issue of raising Cossack wages because of the truce with Khan Shahin Giray, which dried up an important source of war booty, the instructions to the Cossack delegation included two religious demands—recognition of the hierarchy and of the new archimandrite of the Cave Monastery, Zakhariia Kopystensky.^[215]

Cossacks and Hierarchs

If the new Orthodox hierarchy considered that the Cossacks were merely a convenient cudgel with which to beat the government—one that could be taken up when necessary and set aside when no longer required—then this view was entirely mistaken. The Cossacks regarded the Orthodox Church, especially the hierarchy that had been consecrated under their protection, as their own cudgel to be used in the struggle with the gov­ernment. Not surprisingly, they stood in the way of any efforts on the part of the Kyivan hierarchs to reach an understanding with their Uniate op­ponents and, through them, with the authorities.

The true parameters of the Cossack-Orthodox alliance and the degree of freedom that the Cossacks were prepared to allow their hierarchs be­came completely apparent in the latter half of the 1620s, when the Kyivan clerical elite—at first cautiously, then with ever greater enthusiasm— entered into the process of reconciliation between Uniates and Orthodox. The stimulus for this process was a decision of the Diet of 1623 to establish commissions for that purpose and the proposal voiced at one of the com­missions by the Polish primate, Wawrzyniec Gembicki, to convoke a joint Uniate-Orthodox sobor. In Ruthenian ecclesiastical circles, the initiative for an understanding proceeded in the first instance from the Uniate party, especially from Metropolitan Iosyf Veliamyn Rutsky. On the Orthodox side, the main initiative for reconciliation came from Archbishop Meletii Smotrytsky of Polatsk, but his ideas (and, to a lesser degree, his enthusi­asm) were shared, to all appearances, by Metropolitan Iov Boretsky and later by the archimandrite of the Cave Monastery, Petro Mohyla.^[216]

The negotiations initiated in the latter half of 1623 by Rutsky and his representative Ivan Dubovych with Boretsky and Smotrytsky on the Orthodox side were kept secret by the participants. The scant information released at the time by both parties represented the negotiations as a victory for the side that happened to be reporting on them. For instance, in December 1623, Andrii Muzhylovsky wrote, evidently on the basis of statements by Boretsky or Smotrytsky, that Dubovych had been ‘sent by Rutsky and Iosafat of Polatsk and other arch-recusants against us to our poor pastors, asking that they be permitted to come under the authority of the patriarch of Constantinople and admitted to the dogmas of the faith’.^[217]

Rutsky, conversely, painted a different picture in his report to the Con­gregation for the Propagation of the Faith: the Orthodox were prepared to accept Catholic dogmas, but would not submit to the direct authority of Rome. As a possible solution to the problem, Boretsky and Smotrytsky proposed, according to Rutsky, to leave the united Ruthenian Church under the jurisdiction of Constantinople, which in turn would recognize the supremacy of Rome, as under the terms of the Union of Florence. The other alternative put forward by the Orthodox—but whose true authorship belonged, in Rutsky’s opinion, to certain Commonwealth senators—was that of establishing a Ruthenian patriarchate in a vaguely defined union with Rome. The proposal amounted to a form of auto­cephaly for the Kyivan metropolitanate, and in this connection the Orthodox alluded to the popularity of the idea of a patriarchate among the faithful in general and the Cossacks in particular. It was planned ‘to attract the people and the Cossacks with the alluring title of patriarch, for they speak of this continually, but care little for the truths of the faith’.^[218] Judging by the subsequent writings of Meletii Smotrytsky, this an­nouncement of Rutsky’s reflected the actual disposition of Smotrytsky himself and of Metropolitan Iov Boretsky as well.

In the course of the next several years, while the cause of understand­ing between Orthodox and Uniates and the convocation of a joint sobor for the purpose advanced steadily, it was beset by an ever-growing num­ber of problems. At the Diet of 1626, to which the Cossacks dispatched a delegation with demands for official recognition of the Orthodox hier­archy, the king insisted that the only way to settle the religious conflict was to hold a joint sobor at which the two contending parties might achieve an understanding, and convoked such a sobor for September 1626. But the plan encountered serious obstacles on both the Orthodox and Uniate sides. While the Uniates ultimately obtained Rome’s agreement in prin­ciple to establish a patriarchate under papal control, they were also for­bidden by Rome to conduct a joint sobor with the Orthodox. The Orthodox clergy was prevented from attending the sobor by its own flock, and Boretsky was even obliged to issue a circular denying rumors that he and Smotrytsky were inclined in favor of the Union. The Orthodox sup­porters of compromise, Smotrytsky and Boretsky, were constantly obliged to conceal their true intentions. On the one hand, they obtained the support of most of the Orthodox bishops, as well as of Petro Mohyla, who became the archmandrite of the Kyivan Cave Monastery in 1627. On the other hand, it proved impossible to keep the negotiations secret, and the Orthodox bishop Isaia Kopynsky, who opposed any agreement with the Uniates, began to incite the nobility, the Cossacks, and some of the clergy against the metropolitan.^[219]

At the Orthodox sobor in Kyiv in August 1628, there was a serious con­frontation on the issue of ‘reconciliation between Rus' and Rus”. In the spring of that year, an Orthodox sobor of bishops had been held at the town of Horodok in Volhynia with the participation of Iov Boretsky, Meletii Smotrytsky, Isaakii Boryskovych, Paisii Ipolytovych, and Archi­mandrite Petro Mohyla. It was decided to hold a sobor to discuss the question of relations between Orthodox and Uniate Rus', and Smotryt- sky was to prepare a special treatise on the importance of the reconcili­ation and possible unification of the two churches, as well as a memorandum on the existing differences between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. As a result of this arrangement, Smotrytsky wrote a book en­titled An Apology for My Peregrination to the Eastern Lands and a memo­randum on doctrinal differences that was later published in the same volume as the Apology. The text of the book, which took the form of a cri­tique of the ‘errors' of the Orthodox Church, was sent to Kyiv to be printed and became the basis for a devastating attack on Smotrytsky at the August sobor in Kyiv.^[220]

The leading role in the attack was played by the priests Andrii Muzhylovsky (backed by the leader of the Lithuanian Protestants, Krzysztof Radziwifi, an irreconcilable opponent of church union) and Lavrentii Zyzanii (Tustanovsky). Their arguments, reinforced with quot­ations from the Apology and accusations that Smotrytsky had abandoned Orthodoxy, inflamed the atmosphere at the sobor and forced Boretsky and other former supporters of Smotrytsky to cease their advocacy of Orthodox-Uniate reconciliation. It was all they could do to save Smotrytsky himself from being defrocked and anathematized by laying the principal blame for the ‘errors' of the book on Kasiian Sakovych. Smotrytsky himself had to renounce his Apology.^[221]

An important factor that affected the outcome of the sobor was the par­ticipation of Cossack representatives. Their attitude at the sobor was the first indication that Boretsky was not indulging in sheer fantasy when he wrote in his protestation of 1621 that the Cossacks needed no prompting from the clergy, as they themselves ‘warn, remind and threaten them and the burghers that there be no change of any kind in the faith and no association with the Uniate apostates’.^[222] During the sobor, Cossack rep­resentatives met with Smotrytsky and chastised him at length, ending the encounter with a direct threat to his life. News also reached Smotrytsky that the Cossacks had sworn to kill him if the sobor were to find him a Uniate. Pressure was brought to bear not only on Smotrytsky but also on Metropolitan Boretsky, whom the Cossacks distrusted as well. A Cossack leader named Solenyk persistently refused to leave Boretsky and Smotrytsky alone in church, and when finally persuaded to do so, he said, ‘Cheat on, cheat on! Both Paul and Saul will get theirs.’^[223]

In his later protestation against the decisions of the sobor of 1628, Smotrytsky expressed his deep dissatisfaction with the role played by the Cossacks in the proceedings of the sobor. He wrote: ‘in that Church, be­cause of a scourge of God, the clergy has long conformed to the will and thinking of laymen, and it is not the clergy that rules on spiritual matters, but the laity; the clergy does so only pro forma’.^[224] In another passage of his protestation, rejecting the sobor’s procedures on the grounds that he had been judged by priests and not bishops, Smotrytsky characterized the state of church government that he found unacceptable as follows: ‘laymen govern priests, and priests govern bishops’.⁶⁸ In this instance, Smotrytsky was not only ably marshaling the argument best suited to his purpose, but also conveying the views and convictions of most Orthodox hierarchs.

In the early 1620s, the Orthodox hierarchy clearly welcomed and en­couraged lay participation in the defense of the threatened church, but as time went on and the question of legitimation remained unresolved, while hope appeared for a reconciliation with the Uniates, leading to the achievement of legitimate status, the hierarchy made ever greater efforts to escape the tutelage of its lay protectors. It was no accident that in 1626 Smotrytsky brought back a proclamation from the Eastern patriarchs that divested the brotherhoods of the right of stauropegion and subordin­ated them to local bishops. Nevertheless, this effort on the part of Smotrytsky and, in his person, of the whole episcopate somewhat to re­duce its dependence on the lay element in general and the Cossacks in particular was belated, to say the least. Neither the nobles nor the Cos­sacks were about to renounce the proprietary role that they had taken on since the consecration of the new hierarchy.

The strength of the embrace of these protectors of Orthodoxy became fully apparent during the preparations for the Kyivan Orthodox sobor of June 1629 and in the course of its proceedings.^[225] The sobor was convoked according to the king’s instructions, simultaneously with a Uniate sobor, to prepare the way for a joint Uniate-Orthodox sobor in Lviv. The Ortho­dox nobility generally boycotted the sobor, taking the firm position that the ‘accommodation of the Greek religion’ could not be referred by the Diet for consideration at a sobor. At the theoretical level, this prob­ably reflected a desire on the part of the nobility to treat the privileges conferred on the Greek religion as its own exclusive property and not to submit them to the disposition of clergymen, burghers, and Cossacks even at an Orthodox sobor. On the practical level, the nobility also did not want to run the risk of having the religious issue ultimately decided by a mixed (Uniate-Orthodox) sobor and subsequently by the king.^[226] The Protestant allies of the Orthodox, for their part, were unhappy at the prospect of a joint sobor of Uniates and Orthodox. For them, the ‘ac­commodation of the Greek religion’ would mean the weakening of the anti-Catholic bloc. The Protestant position is fully characterized by the instructions that Prince Krzysztof Radziwifi gave his messenger to Kyiv in June 1629. He forbade the clergymen of Slutsk to attend the joint Uni- ate-Orthodox sobor in Lviv, because ‘I know nothing and wish to know nothing about those synods’.^[227] As may be judged from the text of the in­structions, the prince did not trust even Andrii Muzhylovsky, Smotryt- sky’s main opponent at the sobor of 1628, who attended the Kyiv sobor of 1629, to all indications, without the permission of his princely patron.

Regardless of the Orthodox nobility’s boycott of the Kyivan Orthodox sobor and the anti-Union measures of the Protestants, there is every reason to believe that it was the Cossacks who became the force that dis­rupted the plans of the Orthodox hierarchs and did not permit a decision in favor of a joint sobor in Lviv. The Kyivan sobor was attended by two of­ficial representatives of the Zaporozhian hetman, Leon Ivanovych, bear­ing a letter from him to the metropolitan. The letter contained a scarcely concealed reproach that the Cossacks had not been invited to the sobor. It went on to say that, ‘living as Orthodox in our faith, into which we were born’, the Cossacks were sending their representatives to the sobor ‘in order to obtain certain information about what is going on there’. In clos­ing, Ivanovych noted that ‘it is our duty and that of every Christian to die for the faith’.^[228]

Besides the hetman’s official representatives, many other Cossacks made their way to Kyiv and constantly sought to squeeze into the church where the sobor was taking place. They were also sending delegations to the clergy and exerting all kinds of pressure on the participants. One of the Cossacks went so far as to threaten Mohyla and Boretsky with the same kind of ‘union’ as had befallen the Kyivan reeve Fedir Khodyka, whom the Cossacks had killed in 1625 after accusing him of supporting the Union. Mohyla even wept at these words. Given the dangerous situ­ation, Boretsky had to spend his nights in the security of the Cave Monastery. With most of the Orthodox delegates absent because of the nobiliary boycott, as well as constant pressure from the Cossacks, it was decided to dissolve the sobor, citing the non-attendance of the nobility. But the sabotage of the sobor was due in no lesser measure to the actions of the Cossacks. The difference between their tactics and those of the no­bility was given full expression by one of the Cossacks in his retort to Adam Kysil, the king’s representative at the sobor: ‘Do not shout, Pole! The delegates petition you, but the drunken louts curse and threaten you!’^[229]

Cossackdom was not prepared to release the Orthodox Church from its grasp and relinquish it to the sphere of influence of the king and the government. For a time, in this struggle to control ecclesiastical policy and maintain Orthodoxy as an oppositional ideology directed against royal authority, the Cossacks enjoyed greater success than Prince Os- trozky and his supporters in the period of the Union of Brest. Having made possible the consecration of the new Orthodox hierarchy and the actual rebirth of the Orthodox Kyivan metropolitanate at the beginning of the 1620s, and having shown their readiness to resort to violence against the government and supporters of the Union, the Cossacks were now prepared to use violence against hierarchs displeasing to them within the renewed Orthodox Church itself. In a way, they had come full circle. Cossack readiness to resort to violence was quite clearly apparent in the statement of one of their leaders to Meletii Smotrytsky at the sobor of 1628: ‘We have paid for this shrine [the Orthodox Church] with our blood; we are also prepared to secure it with our blood or with the blood of those who would show disrespect for it or betray it.’^[230]

The death of Metropolitan Boretsky in the spring of 1631 allowed Cos- sackdom to re-establish complete control over the Kyivan metropol­itanate. The Cossack candidate, Bishop Isaia Kopynsky, was elected and installed as metropolitan by the Cossacks regardless of the opposition of Petro Mohyla and other ‘appeasers’. The search for a compromise with the Union, which had begun in Boretsky’s day, was thus ended, and the Cossacks again became faithful allies of the Orthodox hierarchy and the battering ram of Orthodoxy at the Commonwealth Diets. At the last Diet held in King Zygmunt’s lifetime (March-April 1632), the Cossacks again showed themselves firm defenders of Orthodoxy. Their officers, led by the new hetman of the registered Cossacks, Ivan Kulaha-Petrazhytsky, ef­fectively renewed the course initiated by Sahaidachny: in return for their loyalty to the royal administration, they demanded concessions on reli­gious and social issues.^[231]

The instructions to the Cossack delegation to the Diet emphasized the religious issue, with the Cossacks figuring as defenders of Orthodoxy not just in the Kyiv region, as had often been the case in the past, but inter­vening on behalf of their whole ‘nation of Rus’ ’, not only in the ‘Ruthen­ian lands’ of the Kingdom of Poland but also in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Particular stress was laid on the oppressive measures against the Orthodox, which, as noted in the document, ‘have been approaching us recently in the Siverian land near Chernihiv and other places’. Recall­ing that at the previous Diet the king had promised the Ruthenian nation to accommodate the Orthodox and confirm their bishops in office, the Cossacks demanded the fulfillment of that pledge.^[232]

On the eve of the Diet and in the course of its proceedings, the Cossack question became particularly significant in view of a possible war with Muscovy, in which a special role was assigned to the Cossack forces. The primate of Poland, Jan Wgzyk, even noted that if the Zaporozhian Host received its wages, it could field a larger army for the war than it had done at Khotyn.^[233] Just before the planned war on Muscovy, as before the Kho­tyn War, the Cossacks confronted the government with their demands, including religious grievances of the Orthodox population of the Com­monwealth, but the king, as he had done before the Khotyn War, avoided making any specific promises to the Cossacks. In response to their letter, Zygmunt III said that he knew nothing of any violation of Orthodox rights, but that he would write to the Uniate metropolitan and bishops in the matter. At the same time, the Cossacks were told not to interfere in the affairs of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, as its ‘citizens’ could look after their own rights. As Mykhailo Hrushevsky noted with regard to this answer, the king in effect recognized the right of the Cossacks to come out in defense of the Orthodox Church on the territory of the Kingdom of Poland.^[234]

The death of Zygmunt III on 20 April 1632, during whose life the Orthodox had lost hope of obtaining any concessions on the religious issue, and whose demise was clearly awaited by some of them, became the stimulus to active efforts on the part of the Orthodox nobles and burghers in defense of the Orthodox Church. The king’s death led automatically to the convocation, election, and coronation Diets, which gave the Ukrain­ian Cossacks an opportunity to formulate their religious and social de­mands more clearly to the Commonwealth.

In May 1632, while the nobiliary dietines were in session, the Cossacks held a council on the election of the new king. In a letter of 3 June 1632 to the formal head of the Polish-Lithuanian state during the interregnum, the primate Jan Wgzyk, the Cossacks, in effect, associated the church union exclusively with the late Zygmunt, during whose reign the Uniate Church had been established, and demanded its liquidation: ‘that the newly arisen Union of the Lord who now reposes with God be abolished in the time before the coronation, and that we and our people, who are sincere well-wishers of this state of our fatherland, be accommodated’. Besides the abolition of the Union, the Cossacks demanded the return of formerly Orthodox properties from the Uniates. The list of grievances enumerated by the Cossacks included the familiar images with which the Orthodox had filled their writings and polemical speeches for more than three decades since the establishment of the Union. They complained that Orthodox faithful deprived of spiritual care were living together un­married, that children were dying without having been baptized, and that adults were passing away without having received the last sacraments. Finally, the Cossacks noted that if the religious issue were resolved, they would all be prepared to lay down their lives for the integrity of their ‘dear fatherland’, and if this were not done, they would have to seek other ways of ‘assuaging their conscience’.^[235]

At the Diets of 1632, the principal defenders of Orthodoxy were nobiliary delegates from the Ruthenian palatinates, who managed to cre­ate a rather effective bloc of Protestant and Orthodox delegates that threatened to break up the Diet if the ‘Greek religion’ were not accom­modated. A solution was found in the establishment of a commission under the leadership of Royal Prince Wladyslaw to develop a proposal for the ‘accommodation’ of the Orthodox and divide church property be­tween them and the Uniates. The ‘Measures for the Accommodation of Citizens of the Greek Faith’, worked out by the commission and ratified by Wladyslaw, provided for official recognition of the Orthodox metro­politanate with its seat in Kyiv.^[236] Although credit for the success of the Orthodox at Wladyslaw’s election should go mainly to the Ukrainian and Belarusian nobility, Cossack insistence on the defense of the ‘Greek reli­gion’ became an important precondition of the agreement. In his conver­sations with the papal nuncio, Honoratio Visconti, Wladyslaw spoke directly of the danger posed by the Cossacks if an agreement were not achieved. Given the new war with Muscovy and the victories of the tsarist forces, which took Novhorod Siverskyi and Dorohobuzh, Wladyslaw had no choice but to make concessions to the Orthodox on the religious issue.^[237]

It was between the convocation and election diets of 1632 that the new Orthodox metropolitan, Isaia Kopynsky, and his entourage called on the Cossacks to rise in defense of the faith and asserted that if the repressions continued, they would have to go over to the state of the Muscovite tsar. They also promised to ask the tsar to receive the Cossacks as his subjects. Kopynsky may even have been present at the council of the unregistered Cossacks that deposed the moderate Ivan Kulaha-Petrazhytsky from the hetmancy and elected the candidate of the rank and file, Andrii Havrylovych (Didenko), in his place. Rumors that reached Warsaw and Moscow at the time posited a direct link between the Union and the re­moval of Kulaha-Petrazhytsky. He and his supporters among the officers were accused of having betrayed Orthodoxy and sustained the Union— this, at least, is how the Cossack rank and file saw the matter.^[238] The

Cossacks’ readiness to view their internal conflict from a religious perspec­tive once again indicated the potential danger to the Commonwealth from the Cossacks if the ‘Greek religion’ were not accommodated. The same prospect was raised by rumors that the leader of the Lithuanian Protest­ants, Prince Krzysztof Radziwill, was agitating among the Cossacks.^[239]

The Cossack Revolts

In the course of the 1620s and 1630s, Orthodoxy gave ever greater legit­imacy to the Cossacks’ aggressive stance vis-a-vis the government in the settled area in general and in Kyiv in particular. If the Cossacks some­times neglected the defense of religion in their petitions to Warsaw, they were none the less prepared to use violence against Catholics and Uniates in the Dnipro region. As early as the Diet of 1623, Jerzy Zbaraski indi­cated the dangerous consequences of a union of Cossack power with reli­gious opposition, advising that the Cossacks be pacified ‘not only in view of the danger of a Turkish war’, but also because ‘we are threatened by an imminent storm from that quarter, owing to the religious issue and the great arrogance of those people’.^[240] Even before Zbaraski’s ‘warning’, in September 1622 the Cossacks seized four Uniate monks and imprisoned them at the Trakhtemyriv Monastery. Only upon the king’s intervention and at the request of Metropolitan Boretsky did the Cossacks release the monks, telling them not to appear in the Kyiv region again.^[241] In late 1623 or early 1624, a skirmish is said to have taken place between Cossacks and local Dominicans. According to a report by Andrii Muzhylovsky, the Dominicans supposedly seized some drunken Cossack officers and took them to their monastery. Other Cossacks freed their officers by force and took them back to the hetman. Following this encounter, religious hostility in Kyiv increased sharply. According to Muzhylovsky, ‘... one Cossack, having come upon some monk at the market, has already beaten him severely with a battle-ax’.^[242]

The greatest conflict involving Cossacks took place in Kyiv in early 1625. The Cossacks came to town in large numbers, most probably at the summons of Metropolitan Boretsky, who feared that the Cave Monastery would be transferred to the Uniates after the death of its Orthodox archi­mandrite, Ielysei Pletenetsky. The victims of this Cossack expedition were the Uniate parish priest Ivan Iuzefovych, a former Orthodox who had attempted to keep his church in the Podil district after going over to the Union, and the Kyivan reeve Fedir Khodyka, whom the Cossacks had accused of supporting the Union and ‘sealing’ Orthodox churches. Both were executed by the Cossacks.^[243] On the one hand, this brutal Cossack interference in religious affairs gave the Orthodox a bad name in govern­ment circles and did not promote their success at the Diets.^[244] On the other hand, by resorting to terror and violence, the Cossacks managed to achieve what the nobility would scarcely have been able to obtain by means of parliamentary struggle—undivided possession of Kyiv for the Orthodox and the elimination of Uniate claims to the city’s monasteries. Interestingly, the wave of Cossack religious violence in Kyiv and their killing of Khodyka and Iuzefovych preceded the royal privilege of Febru­ary 1625 that confirmed the Orthodox candidate, Zakhariia Kopysten- sky, in office as archimandrite of the Cave Monastery.^[245]

The armed conflict with the Commonwealth in the autumn of 1625, which became known in Ukrainian history as the Kurukove campaign, was the first Cossack confrontation with the authorities in which the reli­gious factor effectively became part of the ideological arsenal of the Cos­sack uprisings, even though it remained peripheral in relation to demands of a social and juridical nature. Evidence of this is to be found in the dec­larations and counter-declarations that emerged from the Polish and Cos­sack camps during their negotiations in October and November 1625. On the Polish side, in the course of the negotiations we observe an attempt to put a stop to Cossack intervention in the religious struggle. There was even a specific demand to this effect in the first address of the Polish com­missioners to the Cossack Host. The Cossacks replied with their own declaration, explaining their actions in Kyiv as responses to the insults inflicted on the Orthodox faith by the Uniates and demanding ‘accom­modation of the Greek faith’. Characteristically, Cossackdom did not in­sist on the recognition of the hierarchs consecrated by Theophanes, a painful question for the higher Orthodox clergy and the royal administra­tion alike. This in turn gave the Polish commissioners the opportunity to employ the same tactics as those used by the government after Khotyn. During the new negotiations that followed a brief military encounter, the Cossacks were told that no one was persecuting the ‘Greek religion’; rather, the issue was that religious affairs should be left to the clergy, not to the Cossacks. Religion was thus left out of the final draft of the Polish-Cossack agreement reached at Lake Kurukove.^[246]

Thus, following the Khotyn agreement, the one at Lake Kurukove laid the foundations of subsequent Cossack diplomacy on the religious ques­tion. The Cossacks intervened in religious strife on the side of the Ortho­dox and advanced religious demands in their negotiations with the Commonwealth authorities, but almost always sacrificed them in the end so as to achieve more pressing Cossack objectives, such as increases in the register, wages, and, later, the territory of the Zaporozhian Host. Re­gardless of Cossack readiness to give up religious demands at the last mo­ment, there was a prevalent and even growing conviction among the Cossacks themselves and the eastern Ukrainian population at large that the Cossacks were defenders of Orthodoxy and that their defeat would mean the abolition of the Orthodox faith.^[247]

The Cossack war of 1630 led by Taras Fedorovych (Triasylo) became the first revolt since the uprising of Severyn Nalyvaiko that outgrew the dimensions of a Cossack conflict with the authorities to encompass a larger territory, drawing a multitude of Ukrainian peasants and burghers into the whirlwind of revolt. As mentioned earlier, the conflict began with an attack by those stricken from the register on the hetman of the regis­tered Cossacks, Hryhorii Chorny, who was seized by the Zaporozhians in the settled area and executed. This led to a broader uprising that gave the Cossacks control of Dnipro Ukraine. For the first time, religion, or, more precisely, the defense of Orthodoxy against the advance of the Union, be­came an ideology that linked Cossacks, rebellious peasants, and the offi­cially persecuted Orthodox clergy.⁹²

The principal opponent of the Cossack rebellion, Crown Field Het­man Stanislaw Koniecpolski, claimed in his account prepared for the Diet of 1631 that after the execution of Chorny, whom the Zaporozhians considered responsible for their exclusion from the register, the rebels were preparing to return to Zaporizhia. At this juncture, however,

they received letters from a number of people, both clergy and laymen of the Greek religion, apprising them that the faith was being destroyed and churches taken away, and asking them to stand up for the faith.... The unruly ones im­mediately issued proclamations to the effect that the faith was at stake, and that anyone who had ever been a Cossack or wanted to be one should rally: they were promised all kinds of ancient liberties, or, to express it better, unruliness.⁹³

Koniecpolski in fact indicated the significant conjunction of two motifs in Cossack agitation: the idea of preserving ‘ancient’ rights and the defense of the ‘Greek’ religion. This was perhaps the first instance in which the two arguments were conjoined to legitimize the uprising.

Quite obviously, Koniecpolski gave no credence to either of these argu­ments. As the quoted extract shows, he regarded the ‘ancient’ liberties as unruliness and the slogan of the defense of the faith as a mere instru­ment of rebellion. ‘They have torn so many innocent people from their homes, their farms and occupations under the pretext of violation of the faith, in respect to which there had been no wrongdoing to anyone’, he wrote to the Cossacks during the negotiations at Pereiaslav. The Cos­sacks, for their part, in replying to the field hetman, stood by their ‘priv­ileges’, including the right to elect their leader (starshyi) and to defend the Orthodox faith. They confirmed that they had sent proclamations ap­pealing for such a defense, but indicated that the uprising had acquired a religious coloration not so much because of their agitation as because

certain clerical and lay people... not only heard in neighboring towns but ex­perienced it themselves last year, when they were forbidden to celebrate the

⁹² On the role of the religious factor in the uprising of 1630, see P. N. Zhukovich, ‘Religiozno- tserkovnyi ∣≥lement v kazatskom vosstanii 1630 goda (pod predvoditel’stvom Tarasa)’, KhCh 236 (1911): pt. 1, pp. 777-802, 987-1007 (included in his Seimovaia bor'ba zapadno-russkogo dvorianstva s tserkovnoi uniei [s 1609 g.]); Hrushevs’kyi, Istoriia Ukramy--Rusy, vol. 8, pt. 1, pp. 66-73, 99-120; Chodynicki, KosciolPrawoslawny, pp. 528-34.

⁹³ Koniecpolski’s account is cited here and below according to the text in Hrushevs’kyi, Istoriia Ukratny-Rusy (vol. 8, pt. 1, p. 73). Hrushevsky used a copy of the account in the St Petersburg Public Library, Pol. F. IV, no. 241, p. 682 ff. The same copy was used by Mykola Kostomarov and Platon Zhukovich. It was returned to Poland in the 1920s. Chodynicki cites it as ‘regained’ (KosciolPrawoslawny, p. 530). liturgy in the churches and the brotherhood church was bloodied by the gentle­men soldiers who were stationed in Kyiv—that led people to assemble.^[248]

Who were these ‘clerical and lay people’ who urged the Cossacks to come out in defense of Orthodoxy? Koniecpolski complained about them in his reports, and a contemporary Catholic bishop, Pawel Piasecki, wrote in his Chronica about the incitement of the Cossacks by an uniden­tified Kyivan archimandrite.^[249] Unfortunately, we have no detailed infor­mation about the attitude of the Orthodox hierarchs to the uprising of 1630.^[250] This silence of the sources is entirely understandable in light of the tense relations between the hierarchy and the Zaporozhian freemen prior to the revolt. Nevertheless, there is every reason to believe that among the lower clergy there were many who easily fit the description of the ‘agitators’ to whom Koniecpolski referred. To some extent, the atti­tudes of these supporters of Cossackdom can be reconstructed on the basis of the Lviv Chronicle, whose authorship is attributed by most scholars to the Orthodox priest Mykhailo Hunashevsky.^[251]

The author of the Lviv Chronicle quite clearly saw the uprising of 1630 as acquiring the dimensions of a ‘war of religion’. His account also lent a religious coloration to the conflict between the registered Cossacks and those stricken from the register, which set off the uprising. Hryhorii Chorny (‘Hrys’ko het’man’) was censured by the chronicler not only be­cause he ‘apportioned the money badly’, but also because he ‘had sworn allegiance to the Union’. The chronicler said of the Uniates that they had allegedly given money originally collected for schools (between 40,000 and 80,000 zlotys) to Koniecpolski for his expedition against the Cos­sacks, and that the Uniate metropolitan Rutsky himself had come to Kyiv to meet with Koniecpolski and the Polish soldiers. The quintessence of the chronicler’s view of the Cossack-Polish war was a sentence that he placed into Koniecpolski’s mouth on the battlefield: ‘There is a union for you—the Rus' lie with the Poles!’⁹⁸

Another important element in the Lviv Chronicle’s account of the war of 1630 is its author’s close association of religious and national elements. In his interpretation, Cossackdom appears as an inalienable element of Rus’, and Rus’ is often identified with Orthodoxy. The Cossack conflict with the Polish authorities thus takes on the attributes not only of a reli­gious war but also of a national one. The introduction of Commonwealth forces into Ukraine is seen in this context as an attack on Rus’ as a whole: ‘the soldiers came to Kyiv with the intention of slaughtering first the Cos­sacks and then the Rus’ throughout Ukraine as far as Muscovy’, and Koniecpolski nursed a ‘great anger... against the Cossacks and all of Rus’’. The chronicler’s account of the actions of a Polish official, Samuel Laszcz, against the rebels also represents the conflict as a national and religious war:

On his way to Kyiv, Lord Laszcz slaughtered the entire small town of Lysianka on Easter Day itself, men, women and children alike who were in church, and the priest together with them. On the way, they killed innocent people, if only they were Rus’.

The chronicle notes that German mercenaries ‘plundered’ St Nicholas’s Hermitage Monastery, ‘damaged’ the Jordan Monastery, wanted to storm the Mezhyhiria Monastery, and ‘probably, if they had succeeded in their intentions, all of Rus’ would have suffered...’. The author of the chronicle apparently believed that the general assault on the Rus’ nation and religion was sanctified by the Polish Roman Catholic Church. Ac­cording to the chronicle text, Dominican monks gave Koniecpolski their blessing for war with the Rus’: ‘the sword was blessed and carried around the church, and for the duration of the Mass it lay on the altar with the words that it was against the infidels, against Rus’, to extirpate them’.⁹⁹

⁹⁸ Bevzo’s introduction to L’mvs’kyi litopys, pp. 106, 110-11. These words were allegedly spoken in the presence of five ‘most reverend’ priests who were in the Polish camp. The editor of the chronicle, O. A. Bevzo, paid special attention to this report, transcribing this sentence of the chronicle as follows: ‘Pry panu het’manu ottsov bulo chestnishykh p”iat’ ’ (There were five most reverend priests with the lord hetman). Bevzo rejected the readings inashykh (and ours) and ot nashykh (of ours) that had appeared in place of chestnishykh in previous editions, maintaining that the reference could only be to Catholic priests, and by no means to Orthodox ones. Nevertheless, the reading of the obscure word in the manuscript as chestnishykh instead of i (ot) nashykh does not alter the general sense of the sentence, as there is no doubt that the Orthodox author could only have used the word chestnishykh with reference to Orthodox priests. The presence of Ortho­dox clergymen in Koniecpolski’s company helps to explain why he shared his thoughts on the Union with them and how this information reached an Orthodox chronicler. The strained relations between the higher Kyivan clergy and the Cossacks before the uprising, as well as the Orthodox hierarchy’s attempts to remain on the best possible terms with the authorities, make the temporary presence of Kyivan clergymen in the Polish camp a distinct possibility.

⁹⁹ Ibid., pp. 106-11. According to the chronicle data, the companions of the ‘royal company’ that was stationed in Lutsk before military operations began ‘greatly overpraised themselves

The chronicle account notes some interesting details confirming that the Cossacks themselves perceived their uprising as a national and reli­gious war. According to the chronicle, the Cossacks, in destroying Com­monwealth units advancing to reinforce the main Commonwealth army, left Ruthenian soldiers alive: ‘and of the haiduks who were there, those who were Ruthenians, they left them alive and did not kill them...’. Nevertheless, this orientation on the national factor was not ‘uncondi­tional’ among the Cossacks, even according to the chronicler’s testimony. It emerges from the chronicle account that the Cossacks, in fighting the Commonwealth army, often showed no mercy to their compatriots and co-religionists in the Polish-Lithuanian ranks and did not hesitate to seek them out even in churches: ‘They found one Ruthenian, Popel, at the priest’s; they took him out and shot him, and another at the Church of St Theodosius.’¹⁰⁰

The author of the Lviv Chronicle was not the only Ruthenian who viewed the 1630 uprising as a national and religious war. In large part he merely related rumors and presented views prevailing in Orthodox cler­ical circles and within the Orthodox population. Corroboration of this is to be found in statements made by Ukrainian Orthodox monks traveling to Moscow at the time who were interrogated by Muscovite border voevodas. According to statements made in Putyvl in April 1630 by mes­sengers from Metropolitan Iov Boretsky on their way to Moscow, Commonwealth forces were stationed in the Dnipro region ‘to violate the Christian faith in Kyiv and establish the Union and the Roman faith and go against the Cossacks’.¹⁰¹ Nor did the Kyivan clergy’s view of war aims change when military operations were over. According to statements by Ukrainian monks in Moscow, given that Koniecpolski had failed to defeat the Cossacks and ‘did not convert the Christian faith to his own Roman one’, he would demand a levy en masse to extirpate the Cossacks ‘and de­stroy the Christian faith so as to establish the Roman faith alone through­out Poland and Lithuania’.¹⁰²

The religious element in the ideology of the Cossack revolt received due attention in Commonwealth ruling circles. At the Diet of 1630,

with regard to Rus’, saying, “When we return, we will have all of you in our fist”’ (Bevzo, ed., L’mvs’kyi litopys, p. 109). Among the crimes of the Commonwealth forces in Ukraine, the chronicler singles out the following: ‘Before Sunday, they cut to pieces the metropolitan’s ser­vant Petro and three of his subjects’ (ibid., pp. 105, 106).

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., pp. 107-8.

¹⁰¹ VUR, 1: 82.

¹⁰² Hrushevs’kyi, Istoriia Ukramy-Rusy, vol. 8, pt. 1, p. 124; Kulish, Materialy, p. 298. There is evidence that during the uprising, Orthodox monks sought to avail themselves of Cossack support in settling their property disputes. Thus the palatine’s wife, Sofiia Danylovych, charged in the autumn of 1630 that monks of St Nicholas’s Hermitage Monastery had conspired with the Cossacks to seize two villages belonging to her, as well as a ferry crossing near the town of Kryliv on the Dnipro (VUR, 1: 88-9).

Koniecpolski demanded the appeasement of the Cossacks and indicated the danger of Orthodox agitation among the Cossacks and commoners, as well as of Muscovite activity among the Cossacks in the religious sphere. Testimony has also survived of an appeal to the Cossacks from Patriarch Theophanes of Jerusalem at the beginning of 1630 ‘to stand up for the Christian faith’ and to come under the rule of the Muscovite tsar.^[252] Although demands for the freedom of the Orthodox faith were all but absent from the final draft of the Cossack-Polish agreement at Pereiaslav in May 1630, and the Cossacks had to apologize to Koniecpol- ski for having agitated in defense of the Orthodox Church, the religious theme again made its way into the list of Cossack demands immediately after the Pereiaslav agreement. At a council held in Cherkasy in July 1630 in the presence of Metropolitan Boretsky, it was decided to send a dele­gation to the Commonwealth authorities with instructions that included demands of a religious nature.^[253]

Interestingly enough, the presence of the religious factor in the upris­ing of 1630 was noted not only by Polish-Lithuanian official circles, the Muscovite government, and the Eastern patriarchs but also by represen­tatives of Swedish diplomacy. Sweden was attempting to undermine the Commonwealth’s position in the Thirty Years’ War and to prevent the use of Cossack contingents against its own forces. In this context, the transformation of the Cossacks from potential enemies into potential allies in the struggle with the Commonwealth was entirely congruent with Swedish political interests. Since religious allegiance was the usual basis for identifying allies and enemies in Europe of the day, one of the ways to achieve an understanding with the Cossacks, from the viewpoint of Swedish diplomats, was to promote anti-Catholic solidarity between Protestant Swedes and Orthodox Cossacks. At first, Swedish diplomatic agents sought to incite actions against the Commonwealth on the part of the Muscovite tsar in defense of the Orthodox in the Commonwealth; later, they attempted to establish direct contact with the Cossacks.^[254]

In a letter of June 1631 from the Swedish agent in Riga to the Ukrain­ian Cossacks, they were encouraged to turn to the Swedish king, who was represented as an enemy of the Jesuits and a supporter of the Greek religion. It was claimed that Cossack devotion to the faith had been com­mended to the king by none other than Patriarch Kyrillos Loukaris of Constantinople. The attitude of the Cossacks to this Swedish agitation was ambiguous. As noted in a contemporary Muscovite report, the Cos­sack rank and file was prepared to respond to the Swedish appeal on the basis of the wrongs done to their ‘true faith’ by the Poles, but the officers greeted the Swedish envoys rather coldly and ultimately turned them over to the authorities. In all likelihood, this was an attempt on the part of the new officers, installed after the uprising of 1630, to show their readiness to collaborate with the government.^[255]

A great new Cossack uprising took place in 1637-8 under the leadership of Pavlo But (Pavliuk), Karpo Skydan, and Dmytro Hunia. Like the previ­ous uprising of 1630, the war of 1637-8 was waged at least in part under the banner of the defense of the Orthodox faith. Fortunately, there is much better information available about the use of the religious factor in Cossack agitation during the uprising of 1637-8 than about similar actions in 1630. Several proclamations issued by leaders of the uprising, most notably Karpo Skydan and Dmytro Hunia, have come down to the present; some of them make direct reference to the religious issue. Judging by the early proclamations and correspondence of the first leader of the uprising, Pavlo But, it began with a call for the defense of Cossack liberties, with no refer­ence whatever to religious freedom.^[256] The situation changed, however, when news reached the Dnipro region that the Crown army was headed for the Trans-Dnipro region, the Left Bank, in order to take up quarters there. Under these conditions, it was not only the Cossacks but also the local residents who felt themselves directly threatened. Ultimately, as in the uprising of 1630, this made conditions ripe for the mobilization of the masses under the slogan of the defense of the Orthodox faith.

The religious issue was actively exploited in proclamations to the Cos­sacks and the entire population by Karpo Skydan, whom But dispatched from Zaporizhia to the settled area in order to appeal to the local Cossacks and other social groups established on that territory. In the text of his proclamation of 11 October 1637 to the Cossacks and ‘all common people of Christian descent in general’, Skydan appealed to all, ‘if only they call themselves comrades and hold to the true, venerable faith’ to come out against the ‘Liakhs’, enemies of ‘our Christian Ruthenian nation and our ancient Greek faith’.^[257] In his proclamation of 24 October, he appealed once again to the Cossacks of the settled area and commoners courageously to oppose ‘that enemy of our Greek faith’.^[258] In his proclamation of 29 November, he turned to the same strata with an ap­peal against ‘our foes and the enemies of our faith’.^[259]

Appeals in defense of the faith were not, of course, the only instrument employed by the Cossacks for the mobilization of the masses. Skydan’s proclamations also made mention of Cossackdom’s ‘knightly renown’, of its rights and liberties, and of the Polish forces’ intention not only to spill Christian blood but also to violate the Cossacks’ wives and children and make captives of them. In appealing to the Cossacks to protect either reli­gion or their liberties, Skydan in fact targeted the same group of well-to- do Cossacks from the settled area. Their position was no doubt crucial to the success of the revolt, as may be assumed on the basis of a ‘Discourse’ written by Adam Kysil for Hetman Stanislaw Koniecpolski in 1636, on the eve of the revolt. In that memorandum, Kysil divided the Cossacks into three categories—officers, ‘honorable’ Cossacks with families, and ‘wild rebels’. Kysil characterized the Cossacks belonging to the first group as ones whose loyalty could easily be purchased and those in the second group as people who ‘have God in their hearts, who are to some degree pious in religion, to whom freedom, wife and children are dear’. He claimed that when it came to the third group (the ‘rebels’), ‘reason, piety, religion, liberty, wives, and children mean nothing to them’.^[260]

Whether Kysil’s assessment of the ‘rebels’’ religiosity was right or wrong,^[261] there is little doubt that they did not hesitate to use religion to justify their revolt. Characteristically, the split within the ranks of the Cos­sack officers that facilitated the Polish victory over the rebels was repre­sented in the accounts of Cossacks and peasants who crossed the Muscovite border as a betrayal of Orthodoxy by some of the officers: ‘many of their Cherkasian officers have betrayed the Christian faith and converted to the Latin and papist faith’. There is little doubt that the reli­gious factor was significant in shaping contemporary perceptions of the uprising, and the Muscovite voevodas reported to the tsar on the basis of their interrogations of Ukrainians crossing the border to Muscovy that ‘in the Lithuanian towns the Poles are executing, in a variety of ways, Cherkasians of the Ruthenian faith, and Lithuanian people of all kinds, and their wives and children who do not apostatize and convert to the pa­pist faith’. Such were the notions of rank-and-file Cossacks and common­ers who fled across the Muscovite border to escape the Polish forces.^[262]

The Orthodox clergy apparently had a different view of the uprising. When interrogated by Muscovite voevodas, the monks of the Hustynia Monastery stated openly that

the Cherkasians did not want to be under the rule of the nobles and became un­ruly as before, and killed and robbed officials, Poles, and Jews in the towns, and burned Roman Catholic churches in the towns. That is why the Poles are killing them, the Cherkasians, and not for the faith.

It is clear from the voevoda’s report that this interpretation of events was based on the words of the brother of Crown Field Hetman Mikolaj Po- tocki, Stanislaw, who visited the monastery at the time. Nevertheless, the very fact this view was accepted by monks of the Hustynia Monastery, lo­cated far to the east, who cultivated notions of resettling in Muscovy, testifies to a serious degree of estrangement between Cossackdom and the Orthodox clergy during the uprising, as well as to skepticism on the part of the clergy about the Cossacks’ sincerity in the use of religious slogans. Even as they complained of Mohyla’s alleged conversion to Catholicism and his acceptance of the patriarchal title from the pope (a reference to plans for a universal union initiated by the palatine Aleksander Sanguszko), the Hustynia monks, who were influenced by the long-time supporter and protege of the Cossacks, Isaia Kopynsky, did not side with the Cossacks, but looked to Muscovy for deliverance.^[263]

If the uprising of 1630 impressed itself on the consciousness of the Lviv chronicler as a religious war, that of 1637-8 held no such significance for him. In describing the events of 1637 in Ukraine, the chronicler wrote as follows about the actions of the Cossacks prior to the arrival of the Com­monwealth forces:

And in Ukraine the Cossacks rebelled and treated the Poles with contempt, killed the Germans like flies, burned towns, slaughtered the Jews like chickens, some burned monks in Roman Catholic churches, while others threshed grain, rode about seizing herds, and salted meat in barrels, preparing food for themselves.¹¹⁵ It would appear that the chronicler did not condemn Cossack attacks on Poles, Germans, and Jews, who represented non-Orthodox confessions, but neither did he respond to them with enthusiasm.

The role of the religious factor in the uprising of 1637-8 was quite dif­ferent from its role in the previous revolt of 1630. One of the differences was that even the apparent unity of the Orthodox hierarchy and the Cos­sack officers, which still existed in 1630, had vanished completely by the middle of the decade. In the mid-seventeenth century some Polish authors retrospectively attributed the uprising of 1637-8 to Cossack dissatisfac­tion with the ecclesiastical reforms of Petro Mohyla. An anonymous author of a treatise on ways to put an end to the Khmelnytsky Uprising presented the history of the rebellion of 1637-8 as follows: the Cossacks became angry with the metropolitan and then with the nobility, which led the Commonwealth to intervene and put down the uprising by force of arms. He enumerated the positive changes enacted by Mohyla and noted that because of them, the metropolitan had been suspected of introdu­cing the Union. The Cossacks had allegedly wished to drown Mohyla in the Dnipro because he erected a cross resembling a Catholic crucifix op­posite St Sophia’s Cathedral and added a cupola like that on a Roman Catholic church to the restored Church of the Holy Savior. Mohyla al­legedly had to flee Kyiv for his life.^[264]

Cossackdom’s growing tendency to exploit religion in order to legit­imize anti-government revolts inevitably disturbed not only official circles but also the Orthodox hierarchs, who were attempting to free themselves from the Cossacks’ embrace and reach a compromise with the government. Thanks in part to this common denominator in the atti­tudes of the government and the Orthodox hierarchy toward the Cos­sacks, the two sides managed to achieve a long-awaited compromise during the metropolitanate of Petro Mohyla. Even so, this success in rele­gating the Cossacks to the periphery of relations between the Kyivan Orthodox metropolitanate and the Commonwealth government proved only temporary. Considering in retrospect the stages of Cossack politics from the hetmancy of Petro Sahaidachny to the great revolt led by Boh- dan Khmelnytsky, one may conclude that Cossackdom needed a religion irreconcilable with the Catholic faith of the Polish-Lithuanian Com­monwealth so as to legitimize its opposition to that state and its ultimate armed uprising against it. The Cossacks also required a religious consciousness with a powerful national component in order to mobilize support for their revolts in Ruthenian society by means of religious and ethnic appeals.

FOUR