The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  The westernization of the Byzantine heritage and the adaptation of the Orthodox Church to the challenges of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation were the driving forces of Mohyla’s ecclesiastical and educational innovations. As in the case of architecture, it was not merely that models were coming from the West but that they were also Catholic. The Uniates and the Orthodox were in competition, trying to emulate Catholic reform without giving away too much of their Byzantine heritage. While the Uniates could send their students to Rome and to Jesuit colleges in central and western Europe, the Orthodox did not have that luxury. Mohyla addressed the challenge by establishing the first Orthodox college in Kyiv to adapt the Jesuit college curriculum to its needs. The college, created in 1632 through a merger of the Kyiv brotherhood school with the school at the Cave Monastery, later became known as the Kyiv Mohyla Academy and is now one of the leading universities in Ukraine. As it was in the seventeenth century, the academy is the most Western-oriented university in the country.

  Mohyla secured Kyiv’s role as the leading publishing center in the Orthodox lands of the commonwealth and elsewhere. The books published in Kyiv in the 1640s found readers far beyond the borders of Ukraine. One of them, the Liturgicon, was the first book to systematize Orthodox liturgical practices. Another, titled Confession of the Orthodox Faith, presented the first thorough discussion of the basics of the Orthodox faith, offering answers to 260 questions in catechism style. It was written around 1640, approved by a council of Eastern patriarchs in 1643, and published in Kyiv in 1645. Heavily influenced by Catholic models, the Confession became a response to the Protestant-oriented catechism of 1633 issued by Patriarch Cyril Lucaris of Constantinople. The Eastern patriarchs’ stamp of approval made it a standard work for the whole Orthodox world, including Muscovy.

  The educational and publishing projects initiated by Mohyla had as their primary goal the reform of Kyivan Orthodoxy. An educated clergy, a clearly defined confession of faith, and standardized liturgical practices went hand in hand with the metropolitan’s efforts to increase the power of bishops in the church, strengthen ecclesiastical discipline, and improve relations with the royal authorities. All these measures responded to the challenges of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation—hallmarks of the confessionalization of religious life all over Europe. “Confessionalization” meant a number of things. In the course of the sixteenth century, all churches along the Catholic-Protestant divide were busy formulating professions of faith, educating their clergies, strengthening discipline, and standardizing liturgical practices in cooperation with the secular authorities. By the mid-seventeenth century, under the leadership of Peter Mohyla, the Orthodox had joined this general European trend.

  Remarkably, Kyiv, a city scarcely noted on the map of the Orthodox world since the Mongol invasion of 1240, played the leading role in the Orthodox Reformation, not Moscow or Constantinople. A number of reasons underlay that development in addition to those outlined above. After the Time of Troubles, the patriarchs of Moscow were isolated not only from the Western but also from the Eastern Christian world, believing that there was no true religion outside the Tsardom of Muscovy. Constantinople, under the control of the Ottomans, tried to conduct reform on the Protestant model but did not get very far. In 1638, Patriarch Cyril Lucaris, who nine years earlier had published a Latin-language Orthodox profession of faith (Confessio) heavily influenced by Protestant doctrine, was strangled on orders of the sultan for allegedly instigating a Cossack attack on the Ottoman Empire. In the same year a church council in Constantinople anathematized him for his theological views. In the contest between Mohyla and Lucaris and between Catholic and Protestant models for the reform of Orthodoxy, Mohyla’s model emerged victorious. His reforms would have a profound impact on the Orthodox world for another century and a half.

  The Union of Brest left the Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) society of the commonwealth in general, and the Ukrainian elites in particular, split between two churches—a division that endures in today’s Ukraine. But the struggles over the fate of the union also left that society much more conscious of its commonalities, including history, culture, and religious tradition. For all its verbal ferocity and occasional physical violence, that struggle helped form a new pluralistic political and religious culture that allowed discussion and disagreement. Ukraine’s location on the religious boundary between Western and Eastern Christianity produced not one “frontier” church that combined elements of the two Christian traditions (a distinction often ascribed to the Uniates alone) but two. The Orthodox, too, embraced new religious and cultural trends from the West as they sought to reform themselves and adjust to conditions in the decades following the Union of Brest. In the early seventeenth century, it was even more difficult to draw a clear line between Christian East and Christian West in Ukraine than it is now.

  The polemics over the Union of Brest helped awaken Rus’ society on both sides of the religious divide from a long intellectual sleep. The issues discussed by the polemicists included the baptism of Rus’, the history of the Kyiv metropolitanate, the rights of the church and of the Rus’ lands under the Lithuanian dukes and of the Orthodox under the Union of Lublin, and the royal decrees and Diet resolutions of the subsequent era. For those who could read and took part in the political, social, and religious developments of the day, the polemicists created a sense of self-identity that had not previously existed. If they were at odds on issues of religion, the polemicists all showed the highest regard for the entity that they called the Ruthenian nation (naród Ruski), in whose interest they allegedly conducted their struggles.

  Chapter 10

  The Great Revolt

  The Cossack uprising that began in the spring of 1648, known in history as the Great Revolt, was the seventh major Cossack insurrection since the end of the sixteenth century. The commonwealth had crushed the previous six, but this one became too big to suppress. It transformed the political map of the entire region and gave birth to a Cossack state that many regard as the foundation of modern Ukraine. It also launched a long era of Russian involvement in Ukraine and is widely regarded as a starting point in the history of relations between Russia and Ukraine as separate nations.

  The Great Revolt began in exactly the same manner as the first Cossack uprising, led by Kryshtof Kosynsky in 1591—with a dispute over a land grant between a magnate and Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a petty noble who also happened to be a Cossack officer. Aged fifty-three at the time, he was an unlikely leader of a Cossack rebellion, having served the king loyally in numerous battles and become chancellor of the Cossack Host following the uprising of 1638. After the servant of a prominent commonwealth official took his estate of Subotiv from him, Khmelnytsky turned to the courts, but to no avail. More than that, his powerful opponents put him in prison. He escaped and went directly to the Zaporozhian Sich, where the rebellious Cossacks welcomed him as one of their own and elected him their hetman. It was March 1648. The Golden Peace was over; the Great Revolt had begun.

  Up to that point, developments resembled those of previous Cossack uprisings, but Khmelnytsky changed the familiar pattern. Before marching northward, capturing towns, and confronting the commonwealth army, he went south in search of allies. In a dramatic reversal of established steppe politics, he offered the Crimean khan his friendship and an opportunity. The cautious khan allowed his vassals, the Noghay Horde north of the Crimea, to join the Cossacks. For Khmelnytsky and the Cossack rebels, this was a major coup. While the popular image of the Cossack nowadays is a man on horseback, in the mid-seventeenth century most Cossacks were in fact infantrymen. They lacked a cavalry of their own because maintaining one was too expensive: only nobles could afford to keep a battle-ready horse, often more than one. Khmelnytsky’s new alliance with the Tatars, who fought on horseback, solved the cavalry problem. From then on, the Cossacks could not only take poorly fortified borderland towns or defend themselves in fortified camps but also confront the Poli
sh army in the field.

  It did not take long for the alliance to prove its worth. In May 1648, Cossack and Tatar forces defeated two Polish armies, one near the Zhovti Vody (Yellow Water) River near the northern approaches to the Zaporozhian Sich, the other near the town of Korsun in the middle Dnieper region. A key to Cossack success, apart from the participation of Noghay cavalry (close to 4,000 horsemen) in both battles, was the decision of some 6,000 registered Cossacks to switch sides, abandon their Polish masters and join the Khmelnytsky revolt. The Polish standing army was completely wiped out. Its two chief commanders, the Crown grand hetman and the Crown field hetman, as well as hundreds of officers, ended up in Tatar captivity.

  While the Cossacks’ sudden success shocked the commonwealth, Khmelnytsky and his closest supporters could not believe their luck. The hetman did not know what move to make next. In June 1648, with the Polish armies gone and the commonwealth in disarray, Bohdan Khmelnytsky took something of a summer hiatus and retired to his native Chyhyryn to consider what to do. But the rebels refused to take any breaks. With the old registered Cossacks gathered near Bila Tserkva, a town south of Kyiv, the popular uprising began in earnest in the rest of Ukraine. Inspired by the news of Cossack victories, the peasants and the townspeople took matters into their own hands, attacking the estates of large landowners, harassing their retreating private armies, settling scores with nobles, and hunting down Catholic priests. But those who suffered most from the peasant revolt in the summer of 1648 were the Jews of Ukraine.

  The first letters that Khmelnytsky sent to the authorities as the revolt began already mentioned Jewish leaseholders. The Cossack hetman complained of the “intolerable injustices” that the Cossacks were suffering at the hands of the royal officials, the colonels—Polish commanders of the registered Cossacks—and “even” the Jews. Khmelnytsky mentioned the Jews in passing, placing them in the third or even fourth echelon of Cossack enemies, but the rebels in Right-Bank Ukraine, where Jews began to suffer attack en masse in June 1648, had their own priorities. They assaulted and often killed Jews (especially men), leading to the destruction of entire communities, which they all but wiped from the map in the course of three summer months of 1648. We do not know the number of victims, as we do not know the number of Jews living in the region before the revolt, but most scholars estimate Jewish losses at 14,000 to 20,000 victims—a very high number, given the time and place. For all its rapid economic development, seventeenth-century Ukraine was relatively sparsely settled.

  Twentieth-century Jewish and Ukrainian historians have placed considerable emphasis on the underlying social causes of anti-Jewish antagonism in Dnieper Ukraine of that period. Rivalry between Jewish and Christian merchants and artisans in the cities and towns, as well as the Jewish leaseholders’ role as middlemen between nobles and peasants, did indeed contribute to the violence unleashed by the Cossack revolt. But one should not lose sight of religious motives in the attacks on Ukrainian Jewry. Religion was essential to social identity on both sides of the Christian-Jewish divide. It was not for nothing that the best-known Jewish chronicler of the massacres, Nathan Hannover, called the attackers “Greeks,” referring to their Orthodox religion, not their nationality. Some rebels felt that they were on a religious mission to convert those Jews who had escaped the massacre. Forced conversion to Christianity saved the lives of many Jewish men. Some of them joined the Cossack ranks, while others returned to Judaism once the threat of annihilation was over.

  By the time Khmelnytsky and his armies began moving west of the Dnieper in the fall of 1648, they had annihilated Jews, Polish nobles, and Catholic priests throughout the region as far as the Polish strongholds of Kamianets in Podolia and Lviv in Galicia. The Uniates were gone as well, either retreating westward or converting to Orthodoxy. The latter was easy to do, as the two Eastern Christian churches differed in jurisdiction only. Few people understood or cared about dogmas. The newly assembled Polish army tried to stop the joint Cossack-Tatar march westward but suffered another major defeat at Pyliavtsi in Podolia. By the end of the year, Cossack and Tatar units were besieging Lviv and the town of Zamość on the Polish-Ukrainian ethnic border. But they did not proceed much farther. Political considerations dictated the end of the offensive, not military ones, as there were no troops between the Cossack armies and Warsaw.

  Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s new agenda was no longer the mere defense of Cossack rights and privileges, as in the first months of the revolt, but neither was it the destruction of the commonwealth. The Cossack hetman spelled out his new program during negotiations with the Polish emissaries who visited him in January and February 1649 in the town of Pereiaslav southeast of Kyiv. Khmelnytsky declared that he was now the sole master of Rus’ and threatened to drive the Poles beyond the Vistula River. Khmelnytsky must have been thinking about himself as an heir to the princes of Kyivan Rus’.

  Such was the mind-set that had led him to arrange a triumphant entrance into Kyiv for himself in December 1648. There the metropolitan of Kyiv greeted the hetman, as did the patriarch of Jerusalem, who addressed Khmelnytsky as a prince and gave him his blessing for war with the Poles. The professors and students of the Kyivan College established by Mohyla were eager to welcome the new leader of Rus’. They called him Moses for delivering the Rus’ nation from Polish enslavement—a distinction they never dared to give their previous patron, Metropolitan Mohyla, who had died two years earlier, in December 1646. The Cossack hetman was taking on the leadership of the whole nation, no longer fighting for the rights of the Cossacks alone. The way to secure the rights of the Rus’ nation was to create a “principality,” or a state. This was a revolutionary development. The Cossacks, who had come into existence on the margins of society, in opposition to an established polity, were now thinking about creating a state of their own.

  The borders of the new state would be drawn in battle, and the battle most crucial to that process was fought in the summer of 1649 near the town of Zboriv in Volhynia. There Khmelnytsky’s forces, assisted by the Crimean Tatars under Khan Islam III Giray, attacked the army of the new Polish king, John II Casimir. The battle ended in victory for the Cossacks, who, with the help of their Crimean allies, forced the Polish officials to sign an agreement giving royal recognition to the officially autonomous but actually independent Cossack state within the commonwealth. The king agreed to increase the Cossack register to 40,000. (In reality, the Cossack army at Zboriv attained a strength of 100,000 Cossacks and armed peasants and townsmen.) The Cossacks received the right to reside in—effectively, to rule over—the three eastern palatinates of the commonwealth. Those were the palatinates of Kyiv, Bratslav, and Chernihiv, which constituted the territory of the new Cossack state, known in history as the Hetmanate. A good part of the Hetmanate happened to be in the steppelands that Polish and French cartographers of earlier decades had called “Ukraine.” The Hetmanate would soon come to be known by that name.

  The head of the new state, as well as its military commander, was the hetman. He ruled the Cossack realm with the help of his general staff, which included a chancellor, an artillery commander, a general judge, and other officials. The military democracy of early Cossack times, which had also been vital in the first months of the revolt, was receding into the past. General councils in which every Cossack had the right to take part gave way to councils of colonels and members of the general staff, who decided the most important matters. Since the revolt against the latifundia system had destroyed the old economy and killed or driven away its major actors, including the Jews, while the peasants now declared themselves Cossacks and refused to work the fields of the nobility, the new state filled its treasury with the help of war booty, customs duties, and the mill tax for grinding grain.

  The old commonwealth administrative system was theoretically left in place, with the post of palatine of Kyiv going to an Orthodox noble loyal to the king, but the Cossack hetman actually ruled, without even informing the king about his ac
tions. In the areas under their control, the Cossacks introduced an administrative system based on their borderland experience and military type of social organization and influenced by military/administrative models from the Ottoman Empire. They divided the territory of the Hetmanate into “regiments,” placing a colonel in charge of each regiment’s administrative, judicial, and fiscal bodies but, first and foremost, its military organization. Each of the twenty regiments, named after its principal town, was obliged to produce a battle-ready Cossack military regiment. The same combination of military, administrative, and judicial powers in one office was introduced on the level of smaller towns and villages. Cossack captains ran these, tasked mainly with mustering a company (a “hundred”) in time of war.

  The alliance with the Crimean Tatars made the Cossack victories of the first two years of the revolt possible. This alliance drew Khmelnytsky into the geopolitical web of the Ottoman Empire, which had a number of dependencies in the northern Black Sea region. These included the Crimea, Moldavia, and Wallachia (part of today’s Romania), and their relations with Istanbul provided Khmelnytsky with a model for establishing his independence vis-à-vis the king without giving up the hard-won Cossack statehood. Cossack Ukraine was prepared to join other Ottoman dependencies as a protectorate of the sultans—that was the essence of the negotiations that Khmelnytsky conducted with Istanbul in the spring and summer of 1651. Preparing for another major confrontation with the commonwealth, he even signed a document recognizing the suzerainty of the sultan.

  In exchange Khmelnytsky wanted immediate protection—Ottoman troops on the ground, attacking the Polish army, as they had done at Ţuţora in 1620 and at Khotyn in 1621. But the Ottomans were fully engaged in sea battles with the Venetians. Instead of sending their own troops, the advisers of the nine-year-old Sultan Mehmed IV ordered the Crimean khan to provide military support for Khmelnytsky. This was not what the hetman desired: the Crimeans were playing their own game, trying to sustain conflict in the area as long as possible so as to prevent the Cossacks from achieving a decisive victory over the commonwealth. That had been the case at Zboriv in 1649, where the khan negotiated a peace with the king instead of helping Khmelnytsky defeat the Polish army. The same situation could easily recur.