The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  The publication of a Church Slavonic translation of the Bible in Ostrih before such a text appeared in Constantinople or Moscow indicated the new prominence of Ukraine in the Orthodox world. Ostrozky did not stop with the publication of the Bible. Not only did he continue his publishing program, both in Church Slavonic and in Ruthenian, which was much more accessible to the public, but the establishment of a school for Orthodox youth, not unlike the one founded by Radvilas for the Calvinists, expanded the activities of the prince’s academic circle. Nor was that the limit of Ostrozky’s ambitions. There are clear indications that he was exploring the notion of moving the patriarchal throne of Constantinople to Ostrih. The idea never materialized, but in the late sixteenth century Ostrih became perhaps the most important center of Orthodox learning.

  Ostrozky, the uncrowned king of Rus’, sought historical and religious justification of the role that he actually played in the region. The introductory texts to the Ostrih Bible and the works of the authors assembled by the prince portray him as a continuator of the religious and educational work begun in Rus’ by Princes Volodymyr the Great and Yaroslav the Wise. “For Volodymyr enlightened the nation by baptism / While Kostiantyn [Ostrozky] brought them light with the writings of holy wisdom,” wrote one of the editors of the Bible. He continued, “Yaroslav embellished Kyiv and Chernihiv with church buildings / While Kostiantyn raised up the one universal church with writings.” Herasym Smotrytsky, a renowned theologian and the most likely author of the verses quoted above, came from “Polish Rus’,” that is, Galicia and western Podolia. There, Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) nobles and burghers benefited from the fruits of Polish Renaissance education much earlier than their counterparts in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

  The team of intellectuals assembled or supported by Ostrozky was international, and some of its most prominent members had Polish backgrounds. Ostrozky’s panegyrists, who came from the ranks of the Polish nobility, had little interest in his contribution to the Orthodox cause but did their best to build up his credentials as a semi-independent ruler. If Orthodox intellectuals linked Ostrozky to Volodymyr and Yaroslav, the Polish panegyrists “established” his historical ties with Danylo of Halych, the most famous ruler of Ostrozky’s native Volhynia. The Poles who served the Ostrozkys, as well as the princes Zaslavskys, who were associated with the Ostrozkys by marriage, carved out for their patrons a new historical and political space not defined by the existing boundaries of the Orthodox Church or the Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. That space was “Polish Rus’”—the Orthodox lands of the Kingdom of Poland. By imposing on the old map of Orthodox Rus’ the boundaries established by the Union of Lublin, the panegyrists created a historical and political reality that would later provide a geographical blueprint for the formation of the modern Ukrainian nation.

  Beyond the realm of arts and letters, imposition of the Lublin boundaries on the old map also included actual mapmaking. A map produced in the 1590s by Tomasz Makowski showed the new border between Polish and Lithuanian Rus’, or, in modern terms, Ukraine and Belarus. Titled “The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Adjoining Territories,” it included the Ukrainian lands and an inset of the Dnieper River. Scholars believe that Kostiantyn Ostrozky supplied the material for the Ukrainian part of the map. The local term “Ukraine” probably made its way onto the Makowski map thanks to the prince or his servitors. The word denoted part of the lands south of the new border, referring to the territory on the Right Bank of the Dnieper extending from Kyiv in the north to Kaniv in the south. Beyond Kaniv, if one trusted the cartographer, there were wild steppes, marked campi deserti citra Boristenem (desert plains on this side of the Borysthenes). “Ukraine” thus covered a good part of the region’s steppe frontier. It seems to have been a booming area, dotted with numerous castles and settlements that had not appeared on earlier maps. The alternative name of the region used on the same map was Volynia ulterior (Outer Volhynia), a designation that stressed the close link between the new “Ukraine” and the old Volhynia, the homeland of the Ostrozkys.

  The Union of Lublin created a new political space for mastering and exploitation first and foremost by the Orthodox princely elite, which, instead of losing its prestige and power as a result of the union, in fact enhanced them. As the princes’ intellectual retainers began to fill that space with content related to the political ambitions of their masters, they looked to history for parallels and precedents, such as the activities of Volodymyr the Great, Yaroslav the Wise, and Danylo of Halych. For all their attention to the past, they were actually creating something new. Their invention would eventually become “Ukraine,” a term that appeared in the region for the first time during this sixteenth-century revival of princely power. It would take time for the name and the new space created by the Union of Lublin to become coterminous.

  Chapter 8

  The Cossacks

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

  The origins of that profound change were in the steppe itself. The struggle that began in the mid-fourteenth century within the Golden Horde, also known as the Kipchak Khanate, led to its disintegration by the mid-fifteenth century. The Crimean, Kazan, and Astrakhan khanates became successors to the Horde, none of them capable of uniting it and some even losing their independence. The Crimea became independent of the Golden Horde in 1449 under the leadership of a descendant of Genghis Khan, Haji Devlet Giray. The Giray dynasty, established by Haji Devlet, would last into the eighteenth century, but his realm would not remain independent. By 1478, the khanate had become a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire—the huge Turkic-dominated Muslim polity that replaced Byzantium as the major power in the western Mediterranean and Black Sea regions in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Ottomans, who made Istanbul, the former Constantinople, their capital in 1453, took direct control over the southern shores of the Crimea, establishing their main center in the port city of Kaffa, today’s Feodosiia. The Girays controlled the steppelands of the Crimea north of the mountains, as well as the nomadic tribes of southern Ukraine, with the Noghay Horde becoming the most powerful of those tribes in the sixteenth century.

  Security concerns and commercial interests attracted the Ottomans to the region. In particular they were interested in slaves. The slave trade had always been important in the region’s economy, but it now became dominant. The Ottoman Empire, whose Islamic laws allowed the enslavement only of non-Muslims and encouraged the emancipation of slaves, was always in need of free labor. The Noghays and the Crimean Tatars responded to the demand, expanding their slave-seeking expeditions to the lands north of the Pontic steppes and often going much deeper into Ukraine and southern Muscovy than the frontier areas. The slave trade supplemented the earnings that the Noghays obtained from animal husbandry and the Crimeans from both husbandry and settled forms of agriculture. Bad harvests generally translated into more raids to the north and more slaves shipped back to the Crimea.

  All five routes that the Tatars followed to the settled areas on their slave-seeking raids went through Ukraine. Two of them east of the Dniester led to western Podolia and then to Galicia; two on the other side of the Southern Buh River led to western Podolia and Volh
ynia, then again to Galicia; the last passed through what would become the Sloboda Ukraine region around Kharkiv to southern Muscovy. If the demand for cereals led to the incorporation of the Ukrainian lands of the sixteenth century into the Baltic trade, their connection to the Mediterranean trade was due largely to Tatar raiding for slaves. Ukrainians, who constituted an absolute majority of the population of the steppe borderlands north of the Black Sea and moved into the steppes in search of grain, became the main targets and victims of the Ottoman Empire’s slave-dependent economy. Ethnic Russians northeast of the Crimea were a close second.

  Michalon (Michael) the Lithuanian, a mid-sixteenth-century author who visited the Crimea, described the scope of the slave trade by quoting from his conversation with a local Jew who, “seeing that our people were constantly being shipped there as captives in numbers too large to count, asked us whether our lands also teemed with people, and whence such innumerable mortals had come.” Estimates of the numbers of Ukrainians and Russians brought to the Crimean slave markets in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries vary from 1.5 million to 3 million. Children and adolescents brought the highest prices. The fates of the slaves differed. Most of the male slaves ended up on Ottoman galleys or working in the fields, while many women worked as domestics. Some got lucky, but only in a matter of speaking. Talented young men made careers in the Ottoman administration, but most of them were eunuchs. Some women were taken into the harems of the sultans and high Ottoman officials.

  One Ukrainian girl known in history as Roxolana became the wife of the most powerful of the Ottoman sultans, Suleiman the Magnificent, who ruled from 1520 to 1566. Her son became a sultan under the name Selim II. Under the name Hürrem Sultan, Roxolana sponsored Muslim charities and funded the construction of some of the best examples of Ottoman architecture. Among these is the Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı, a public bathhouse not far from Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, constructed by the best-known Ottoman architect, Mimar Sinan. In the course of the last two hundred years, Roxolana has figured as the heroine of novels and a number of television dramas in Ukraine and Turkey. To be sure, her life and career were the exception, not the rule.

  The Tatar attacks and the slave trade left deep scars in Ukrainian memory. The fate of the slaves was the subject of numerous dumas—Ukrainian epic songs that lamented the fate of the captives, described their attempts to escape from Crimean slavery, and glorified the men who saved and freed slaves. Those folk heroes were known as Cossacks. They fought the Tatars, undertook seagoing expeditions against the Ottomans, and, indeed, freed slaves from time to time.

  Who were the Cossacks? The answer depends on the period one has in mind. We know for certain that the first Cossacks were nomads. The word itself is of Turkic origin and, depending on context, could refer to a guard, a freeman, or a freebooter. The first Cossacks were all of the above. They formed small bands and lived in the steppes outside the settlements and campsites of their hordes. Living off the steppe, they turned to fishing, trapping, and banditry. Many trade routes crisscrossed the steppe, and the early Cossacks preyed on merchants who ventured there without sufficient guards. We first hear of the existence of Cossacks in the steppe, coming not from the east or south but from the north, the settled area of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, in connection with one such attack on merchants.

  In 1492, the year Christopher Columbus landed on the Caribbean island he named San Salvador and King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella signed a decree expelling the Jews from Spain, the Cossacks made their first appearance in the international arena. According to a complaint sent that year to Grand Duke Alexander of Lithuania by the Crimean khan, subjects of the duke from the cities of Kyiv and Cherkasy had captured and pillaged a Tatar ship in what seems to have been the lower reaches of the Dnieper. The duke never questioned that these might be his people or that they might have engaged in steppe-style highway robbery. He ordered his borderland (the term he used was “Ukrainian”) officials to investigate the Cossacks who might have been involved in the raid. He also ordered that the perpetrators be executed and that their belongings, which apparently had to include the stolen merchandise, be given to a representative of the khan.

  If Alexander’s orders were carried out, they had no lasting effect. In the following year, the Crimean khan accused Cossacks from Cherkasy of attacking a Muscovite ambassador. In 1499, Cossacks were spotted at the Dnieper estuary ravaging the environs of the Tatar fortress at Ochakiv. To stop Cossack expeditions going down the Dnieper to the Black Sea, the khan considered blocking the Dnieper near Ochakiv with chains. It does not appear that the plan was ever implemented or had any impact on Cossack activities. The khan’s complaints to the grand duke were also of little avail.

  The Lithuanian borderland officials were trying to stop Cossack raids with one hand while using the Cossacks to defend the frontier from the Tatars with the other. In 1553 the grand duke sent the captain of Cherkasy and Kaniv, Prince Mykhailo Vyshnevetsky, beyond the Dnieper rapids to build a small fortress in order to stop Cossack expeditions from proceeding farther down the river. Vyshnevetsky used his Cossack servants to accomplish the task. Not surprisingly, the Crimean khan saw the Cossack fortress as an encroachment on his realm, and four years later he sent an army to expel Vyshnevetsky from his redoubt. In folk tradition, Prince Vyshnevetsky became a popular hero as the first Cossack hetman—the title that the Polish army reserved for its supreme commanders—and a fearless fighter against the Tatars and Ottomans.

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

  While the original Cossacks were town dwellers along the Prypiat and Dnieper rivers, by the end of the sixteenth century local peasants had swelled their ranks. This influx ended the uncertainty about the Cossacks’ political, ethnic, and religious identity—whether they were Crimean and Noghay Tatars, Ukrainian subjects of dukes and kings, or a mixture of all peoples and religions. The absolute majority of Cossacks were Ukrainians who came from the huge manorial estates, or latifundia, of the magnates and nobility to avoid what historians call the “second serfdom.” As discussed in chapter 7, the magnates and gentry tried to attract new settlers to their newly acquired estates in the Ukrainian borderlands, which were dangerous to live in because of the continuing threat of Tatar raids, by promising tax-free periods. As these periods expired, many peasants moved farther into the hazardous steppe territories to avoid taxation. Quite a few of them joined the Cossacks and radicalized their social agenda.

  The settlement of Ukraine—the steppe borderland along the middle Dnieper depicted on Tomasz Makowski’s map, as described in the previous chapter—was a common project of the Volhynian princes and the Dnieper Cossacks. In 1559, Kostiantyn Ostrozky became palatine of Kyiv—the viceroy of the vast territories of Dnieper Ukraine. His jurisdiction expanded to Kaniv and Cherkasy, and his responsibilities included the Cossacks, who both enabled and hindered the continuing settlement of the steppelands with their freebooting expeditions against the Tatars and Ottomans. Ostrozky ini
tiated the first efforts to recruit the Cossacks into military service, not so much to use them as a fighting force as to remove them from the lands beyond the rapids and establish some form of control over that unruly crowd. The Livonian War increased the demand for fighting men on the Lithuanian border with Muscovy, and a number of Cossack units were formed in the 1570s, one of them numbering as many as five hundred men.

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

  In 1590, the Commonwealth Diet decreed the creation of a force of 1,000 registered Cossacks to protect the Ukrainian borderlands from the Tatars and the Tatars from the unregistered Cossacks. Although the king issued the requisite ordinance, little came of it. By 1591, the first Cossack uprising had engulfed Ukraine. The Cossacks, who until then had been harassing Ottoman possessions—the Crimean Khanate, the principality of Moldavia (an Ottoman dependency), and the Black Sea coast—now turned their energies inward. They rebelled not against the state but against their own “godfathers”—the Volhynian princes, in particular Prince Janusz Ostrozky (Polish: Ostrogski) and his father, Kostiantyn. Janusz was the captain of Bila Tserkva, a castle and Cossack stronghold south of Kyiv, while Kostiantyn, the palatine of Kyiv, “supervised” his son’s activities. The Ostrozkys, father and son, had full control of the region. No one from the local nobility dared defy the powerful princes, who were busy extending their possessions by taking over the lands of the petty nobility.