against them was regarded by the Cossacks as a sacred duty. Curiously enough, these champions of orthodoxy borrowed the name, which has stuck to them ever since, from their “dog headed” adversaries. The rank and file of the Tatar soldiery were known as Kazaki, or Cossacks, a word meaning “freebooters,” and this term came to be applied indiscriminately to all the free dwellers in the Ukraine, or border-lands. As time went on the Cossacks multiplied exceedingly. Their daring grew with their numbers, and at last they came to be a constant annoyance to all their neighbours, both Christian and Mussulman, frequently involving Poland in dangerous and unprofitable wars with the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, it is not too much to say that, until the days of Sobieski, the Cossacks were invariably the chief cause of the breaches between the Porte and the Republic. We have seen how carefully the Jagiellos avoided participating in any of the crusades directed by the Holy See against the arch-enemies of the Cross. So successful was their prudential abstention that no regular war occurred between Turkey and Poland during the two centuries of their sway. The first actual collisions, the Cecora campaign of 1620 and the Khotin War of 1621 (for John Albert's Moldavian raid does not count), were due to the depredations of the Cossacks upon the dominions of the sultan by land and sea, and in all subsequent treaties between the two powers the most essential clause was always that which bound the Republic to keep its freebooters in order.
But in the meantime the Cossacks themselves had become a semi-independent community. The origin of the Cossack state is still somewhat obscure, but the germs of it are visible as early as the beginning of the 16th century. The union of Lublin, which led to the colonization of Lithuania, was the immediate occasion of a considerable exodus to the lowlands of the Dnieper of those serfs who desired to escape from the taxes of the Polish government and the tyranny of the Polish landlords. Stephen Báthory presently converted the pick of them into six registered regiments of 1000 each for the defence of the border. Ultimately the island of Hortica, just below the falls of the Dnieper, was fixed upon as their headquarters; and on the numerous islands of that broad river there gradually arose the famous Cossack community known as the Zaporozhskaya Syech, or Settlement behind the Falls, whence the Dnieperian Cossacks were known, generally, as Zaporozhians, or Backfallsmen.[1] The Cossack kosh, or commonwealth, had the privilege of electing its hetman, or chief, and his chief officers, the starshins. The hetman, after election, received from the king of Poland direct the insignia of his office, viz. the bulawa, or bâton, the bunchuk, or horse-tail standard, and his official seal; but he was responsible for his actions to the kosh alone, and an inquiry into his conduct was held at the expiration of his term of office in the obschaya shkoda, or general assembly. In time of peace his power was little more than that of the responsible minister of a constitutional republic; but in time of warfare he was a dictator, and disobedience to his orders in the field was punishable by death.
The Cossacks were supposed to be left alone as much as possible by the Polish government so long as they faithfully fulfilled their chief obligation of guarding the frontiers of the Republic from Tatar raids. But the relations between a community of freebooters, mostly composed of fugitive serfs and refugees, and a government of small squires who regarded the Cossacks as a mere rabble were bound to be difficult at the best of times, and political and religious differences presently supervened. The Cossacks, mostly of Lithuanian origin, belonged to the Orthodox religion, so far as they belonged to any religion at all, and the Jagiellos had been very careful to safeguard the religious liberties of their Lithuanian subjects, especially as the Poles themselves were indifferent on the subject. But, at the beginning of the 17th century, when the current of the Catholic reaction was running very strongly and the Jesuits, after subduing the Protestants, began to undermine the position of the Orthodox Church in Lithuania, a more intolerant spirit began to prevail. The old Calvinist nobility of Lithuania were speedily reconverted; a Uniate Church in connexion with Rome was established, Greek Orthodox congregations, if not generally persecuted, were at least depressed and straitened; and the Cossacks began to hate the Pans, or Polish lords, not merely as tyrants, but as heretics. Yet all these obstacles to a good understanding might, perhaps, have been surmounted if only the Polish diet had treated the Cossacks with common fairness and common sense. In 1619 the Polish government was obliged to prohibit absolutely the piratical raids of the Cossacks in the Black Sea, where they habitually destroyed Turkish property to the value of millions. At the same time, by the compact of Rastawica, the sejm undertook to allow the Cossacks, partly as wages, partly as compensation, 40,000 (raised by the compact of Kurukow to 60,000) gulden and 170 wagons of cloth per annum. These terms were never kept, despite the earnest remonstrances of the king, and the complaints of the aggrieved borderers. Parsimony prevailed, as usual, over prudence, and when the Cossacks showed unmistakable signs of restiveness, the Poles irritated them still further by ordering the construction of the strong fortress of Kudak at the confluence of the Dnieper and the Samara, to overawe the Zaporozhian community. This further act of repression led to two terrible Cossack risings, in 1635 and 1636, put down only with the utmost difficulty, whereupon the diet of 1638 deprived the Cossacks of all their ancient privileges, abolished the elective hetmanship, and substituted for it a commission of Polish noblemen with absolute power, so that the Cossacks might well declare that those who hated them were lords over them.
Such was the condition of affairs in the Ukraine when Wladislaus IV. proposed to make the Cossacks the pivot of his foreign policy and his domestic reforms. His far-reaching plans were based upon two facts, the absolute devotion of the Zaporozhians to himself personally, and the knowledge, secretly conveyed to him by Stanislaus Koniecpolski (q.v.), that the whole of the Ukraine was in a ferment. He proposed to provoke the Tatars to a rupture by repudiating the humiliating tribute with which the Republic had so long and so vainly endeavoured to buy off their incessant raids. In case of such rupture he meant, at the head of 100,000 Cossacks, to fall upon the Crimea itself, the seat of their power, and exterminate the Khanate. This he calculated would bring about a retaliatory invasion of Poland by the Turks, which would justify him in taking the field against them also with all the forces of the Republic. In case of success he would be able to impose the will of a victorious king upon a discredited diet, and reform the constitution on an English or Swedish model. Events seemed at first to favour this audacious speculation. Almost simultaneously a civil war broke out in the Crimea and the Porte declared war against the Venetian republic, with which Wladislaus at once concluded an offensive and defensive alliance (1645). He then bade the Cossacks prepare their boats for a raid upon the Turkish galleys, and secured the co-operation of the tsar in the Crimean expedition by a special treaty. Unfortunately, Venice, for her own safety's sake, insisted on the publication of Wladislaus's anti-Turkish alliance; the Porte, well informed of the course of Polish affairs, remained strictly neutral despite the most outrageous provocations; and Wladislaus, bound by his coronation oath not to undertake an offensive war, found himself at the mercy of the diet which, full of consternation and rage, assembled at Warsaw on the 2nd of May 1647. It is needless to say that the Venetian alliance was repudiated and the royal power still further reduced. A year later Wladislaus died at his hunting-box at Merecz, at the very moment when the long-impending tempest which he himself had conjured up burst with overwhelming fury over the territories of the Republic.
The prime mover of the great rebellion of 1648, which shook the Polish state to its very foundations, was the Cossack Bohdan Chmielnicki (q.v.), who had been initiated in all the plans of Wladislaus IV. and, with good reason, feared to be the first victim of the Polish magnates when the king's designs were
- ↑ Cf. American, Backwoodsmen.
