Global Crisis
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Such brutality alienated many supporters, allowing Polish troops to force the Cossack rebels to surrender. They reluctantly swore an oath, drawn up by the secretary of the Zaporozhian warriors, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, that they would henceforth obey the crown in all matters. They also agreed to a reduction in the number of registered Cossacks to 6,000 again, and they promised not to attack the Tatars (or the Ottomans) without express royal permission. Above all, they promised to take orders from a Cossack commissioner appointed by the crown (instead of from their elected Hetman), and agreed that the commissioner would appoint the colonels and captains formerly elected by their men. Naturally, Władysław appointed Polish magnates as commissioners; equally naturally, the commissioners appointed their Polish supporters to serve as colonels and captains. The newcomers soon began to exact much the same taxes and services from the Cossacks as from their peasants, and they punished non-compliance with confiscation of property and even outlawry.
Adam Kysil, who negotiated the treaty that ended the revolt, urged Władysław not to press his advantage too hard. He observed that although war, execution and flight had significantly reduced the number of unregistered Cossacks, the new social order backed by Warsaw rested upon a very narrow base: a few troops, a few managers (mostly Jewish), and a few nobles. The central government, Kysil warned, must realize that ‘it is just as important to take control of the free villages [along the Dnieper] and their peasants, so that they do not have time to run wild, as it is to keep the Cossacks themselves in order, for the peasants cannot stand firm without the Cossack name and advice, nor can the Cossacks do so without the peasants’ strength’.50 Władysław did not listen. Instead, he continued to grant huge estates in Ukraine to leading Polish nobles, who continued to increase the burdens on the peasantry. He also stationed Polish troops in the leading cities where, in the absence of punctual pay, they extracted food, lodging and other goods at gunpoint.
Rabbi Nathan Hannover, who lived in Ukraine, described the cumulative impact of these changes in his Abyss of Despair, an account of the massacre of the Ukrainian Jews in 1648–9. Władysław, he observed, had
Raised the status of the Catholic dukes and princes above those of the [Ukrainians], so that most of the latter abandoned their Greek Orthodox faith and embraced Catholicism [or joined the Uniate Church]. And the masses that followed the Greek Orthodox church became gradually impoverished. They were looked upon as low and inferior beings and became the slaves and the handmaids of the Polish people and of the Jews … Their lives were made bitter by hard labour in mortar and bricks, and in all manner of heavy taxes, and some [lords] even resorted to cruelty and torture with the intent of persuading them to accept Catholicism.51
Although anti-Semitic exaggeration has distorted the record (for example, claiming that Jews had acquired the lease of churches and only allowed Christian services to take place in them in return for hefty payments), Jewish estate managers often did gain extensive powers over the rural population. For example, in many areas Jewish entrepreneurs acquired the exclusive right to distil and sell vodka: this meant that they operated the only taverns in the region, where they could charge whatever prices they liked, and they called in the army to destroy illegal stills. Unsurprisingly, these measures enraged the local population and alienated them from their Jewish neighbours.52
Rabbi Hannover did not mention one more factor that helped to precipitate the rebellion that would cost half of Ukraine's Jews their lives and property: adverse weather. The failure of the 1637 revolt triggered a mass migration of Cossacks to the lower Dnieper which, even at the best of times, suffered from almost unbearable humidity and heat in summers and intense cold in winters. As elsewhere in the northern hemisphere, these were not ‘the best of times’. The diary of Marcin Goliński of Kraków recorded the deteriorating situation, with high bread prices in 1638; an exceptionally cold summer in 1641 (during which the sparse grain harvest ripened late and the wine was sour); spring frosts in 1642 and 1643 that blighted all crops; and heavy snow and frosts in the early months of 1646 that gave way to daily rains so torrential that the roads became impassable. Further south, a French resident concurred. After noting that, even in normal years, the Ukrainian winter ‘has as much power and force to destroy anything as fire has to consume’, he wrote that plagues of locusts in 1645 and 1646, followed by the cruel winter of 1646, had destroyed the harvests and made it impossible for the Cossack communities along the lower Dnieper to feed themselves.53
Amidst this climate-induced adversity, Władysław's plan to launch a massive Cossack raid against the Tatars possessed considerable appeal: war would double the number of registered (and therefore paid) Cossacks to 12,000, offering them a providential escape from overpopulation and hunger. But the federal Diet refused to approve the necessary funds for the venture, while the Cossack commissioner and his subordinates behaved outrageously towards individual Cossacks, including Bohdan Khmelnytsky. While he was away in Warsaw in 1646 to receive the king's instructions for the projected Ottoman campaign, a Polish officer seized some of Khmelnytsky's property and publicly flogged one of his sons so brutally that he subsequently died. Another officer allegedly abducted Bohdan's betrothed and married her; while the following year, Polish troops ravaged his estates. Khmelnytsky therefore fled to the unregistered Cossacks of the lower Dnieper, but he found little solace there: autumn and winter 1647 saw torrential rains that destroyed crops and caused widespread floods; spring 1648 was exceptionally hot and dry, and locusts destroyed the harvest. An inscription carved into the cathedral wall of Old Sambor, not far from Lviv, said it all: ‘There was great hunger throughout the Christian world.‘54
Khmelnytsky chose this moment to declare that he possessed Władysław's personal blessing for another Cossack revolt. He asserted that the king had listened sympathetically when he described the abusive system under which the Cossacks now lived and had stated that, although he lacked the power to restrain his nobles, ‘since you cannot proceed otherwise, avenge your grievances with the sword’. Khmelnytsky also claimed to possess letters signed by the king authorizing the Cossacks to mobilize against their oppressors.55
Although the royal letters were almost certainly forged (nobody ever claimed to have seen the originals), many believed Khmelnytsky's claim that he held some sort of commission from the king – thanks in part to his charismatic character, which impressed virtually everyone he met. Born into a minor noble family in Ukraine around 1595 and educated at a Jesuit college, he acquired extensive military experience and boasted personal contacts not only in Istanbul (where he had spent two years as a captive) but also in Warsaw (where as Secretary of the Host he met not only the king but also his leading ministers). Although at first Khmelnytsky commanded barely 250 followers, within a few weeks several thousand Cossacks – including registered men whose pay had fallen into arrears – rallied to his cause and elected him their Hetman. He also requested and received assistance from the sultan's vassal, the Tatar Khan of the Crimea, whose subjects were also starving (according to a chronicle, ‘last year [1647] there was no harvest, and now the cattle, sheep and cows are dying’).56
In May 1648, Khmelnytsky led his Cossack followers and their Tatar allies towards Kiev where they ambushed a Polish army: the hated Cossack commissioner and almost all the Commonwealth's regular troops either died or surrendered. Almost immediately afterwards, King Władysław died, creating an interregnum. Adam Kysil saw at once the seriousness of the situation. ‘We are no longer dealing’, Kysil warned his colleagues in Warsaw, with the Ukrainians of earlier days who ‘only mounted their horses armed with bows and boar-spears, but with a brutal and impassioned army whose proportions we must reckon thus: that for every one of us there will arise a thousand [of them] with firearms’.57 Whereupon, all over the region, peasants rose up against their lords while the Orthodox clergy called for vengeance against the Catholics; the outnumbered Polish nobles withdrew, hastily followed by their retainers and their estate managers. Accor
ding to a noble refugee, ‘Every peasant has either killed his lord or driven him out with just the shirt on his back, his life, and his children.’ Most abandoned the weapons in their armouries and arsenals, which the Cossacks promptly appropriated.58
Although Kysil persuaded Khmelnytsky to halt his army and send back his Tatar allies, a Cossack leader nicknamed ‘Crook-Nose’ continued to march northwards, encouraging the native population to turn on their remaining oppressors The ‘Victory March’ composed during the uprising describes what happened next:
Hey, Crook-Nose leads a small army,
Seven hundred Cossacks together,
He chops the soldiers’ heads off their shoulders
And drowns the rest in the water.
There on the Vistula, there hang the Polacks,
There like a black cloud they're hanging.
Now Polish glory's shattered and sorry,
While the bold Cossack goes dancing.59
But the Cossacks did not just chop off the heads of soldiers, ‘hang the Polacks’ and then go dancing: they also turned on the Jews. Rabbi Hannover left a chilling description of the massacres that started in June 1648 at the town of Nemyriv, where the local population helped the Cossacks to enter the citadel in which their Jewish neighbours had taken refuge. As the raiders cut down the men, many women jumped off the walls and drowned themselves rather than be raped and then murdered. In all, Hannover estimated that 6,000 died in two days at Nemyriv. July saw similar tragic events further north: 2,000 Poles and 12,000 Jews killed at Polonne when the Ukrainians persuaded the servants within the town to open the gates (‘Why fight us to protect the nobles?’), with more at Zasław (the rabbi's home town) and Ostrog (where the Ukrainians also looted and wrecked the Catholic monasteries).60
It is hard to establish the exact scale of the killings. Early Jewish estimates range from 80,000 to 670,000, but more recent calculations suggest 10,000 killed in the violence itself, at least 8,000 more fugitives to Jewish communities elsewhere (from Amsterdam to Egypt), and perhaps 3,000 sold to the Tatars as slaves. An unknown number survived only because they converted to Orthodoxy. In all it seems likely that the Jewish population in Ukraine fell by half in the summer of 1648. In the opinion of a Jewish chronicler in Kraków, writing later in the century, ‘from the time of the Destruction of the Temple there has not been such a cruel slaughter in the community of the Lord’.61
Three unrelated developments now affected the outcome of the revolt in Ukraine. First, although Khmelnytsky had written a letter to the tsar requesting that he take the entire Cossack Host under his protection, the letter arrived just as Moscow erupted in rebellion: Alexei could not help. Second, the murder of the Ottoman Sultan Ibrahim ruled out aid from the Crimean Tatars, because the khan expected a summons to restore order in Istanbul (chapter 7 below). Finally, while the Polish nobility debated the election of a new king, they appointed three joint commanders for the regular army – and even then created a supervising committee of senators to keep them in check. This divided command made it easy for Khmelnytsky to rout the Poles again in September 1648 and lead his men towards Warsaw (see Fig. 19).
In Kraków, Marcin Goliński saw the perils of the situation clearly. Normally (he wrote in his diary), whenever the Cossacks rebelled the Poles struck first; but the defeat of the Commonwealth's field army left Poland with no defence except prayer. The Danzig correspondent of a London newspaper agreed: ‘The kingdom of Poland is in a most miserable perplexed condition, being troubled within and from without. The peasants of that kingdom massacre all their landlords for [the] great slavery they kept them in, under which they groaned so long. And the Cossacks are 200,000 strong in arms.’ The reporter blamed the crown's refusal to permit the Orthodox Cossacks ‘the exercise of their religion, that restraint having caused more bloodshed than all the other’.62 Eventually the Sejm elected Władysław's brother John Casimir as their king and also authorized a truce with the Cossacks. Khmelnytsky was agreeable (he had supported the candidacy of John Casimir), and he led his men back to Kiev, the ancient capital, where the landmark winter of 1648–9 changed the entire nature of the revolt.
Since the great nobles had all fled, and the lesser ones who stayed lacked any corporate identity, almost by default the Cossack Host became the focus and mouthpiece for the entire community. The policies articulated by this body reflected the fact that the Catholics and most other religious minorities had also fled, leaving the militant Orthodox clergy of Kiev in almost sole control of the pulpits. They hailed Khmelnytsky (despite his Catholic upbringing) as ‘Moses, saviour, redeemer, and liberator of the Ruthenian nation from the slavery of the [Poles], he who was given by God, hence called Bohdan [which literally means God-given]’. Whenever Khmelnytsky attended church he received pride of place, and the Metropolitan compared him to Constantine the Great, the founder of Orthodox piety, and hailed him as ‘prince of Rus' ’ – the descendant of the ancient rulers of Kiev.63
This concerted clerical campaign to turn Khmelnytsky into a national hero affected his style of leadership. He put it best in a speech early in 1649 to Adam Kysil and the other negotiators sent by John Casimir. ‘True enough, I am a wretched little man, but God has granted that I am the sole ruler and autocrat of Rus,’ he began. ‘The time was ripe to negotiate with me when I was being sought and hounded … on the Dnieper’, or ‘when I was on the march to Kiev'; but now ‘I shall fight to free the whole Ruthenian nation from Polish bondage. At first I fought for my own damages and injustice – now I shall fight for our Orthodox faith.‘64 Khmelnytsky and his supporters therefore submitted an ultimatum to the crown that included many ecclesiastical demands: apart from a general amnesty and doubling the number of registered Cossacks entitled to a state salary to 12,000, they required the admission of Orthodox prelates to the federal Diet, the restitution of all former Orthodox churches taken over by the Catholics, and the expulsion of all Jesuits and Jews.65
Kysil and his colleagues realized that the Cossacks had decided to renew the war. As they returned home with the ultimatum they noted that, on the one hand, no crops had been sown whereas, on the other, ‘the masses are arming themselves, savouring freedom from labour and dues, and they do not want to have lords ever again’. They feared that ‘even if Khmelnytsky himself wanted peace, the peasant masses and the Ruthenian priests do not want to allow it – but [rather want] him to finish the war against the Poles, so that the Ruthenian faith may spread, and so they may not have any lords over them’. The next two decades would see (in the words of an early chronicle) ‘the greatest, bloodiest and, since the beginning of the Polish nation, unprecedented war’.66
The Cossack declaration of war is easily explained. Thanks to the landmark winter of 1648–9 and the likelihood of another plague of locusts, a further harvest failure loomed; and so, without crops and without wages from the central government, war alone offered the Cossacks the prospect of sustenance for the coming year. On the other hand, if the nobles and Catholic clergy who had fled should ever return, they would no doubt exact a terrible revenge upon the former rebels – amnesty or no amnesty. Khmelnytsky therefore wrote a series of letters begging assistance from Tsar Alexei, from the Don Cossacks, and from the Tatars. Although the tsar, still facing urban rebellions, again refused to aid the Cossacks openly, he allowed them to import bread and other foodstuffs duty free, which saved many from starvation; and he invited prominent churchmen from Kiev to come to Moscow and work towards a union of all Orthodox churches (naturally under Muscovite aegis). By contrast, Khmelnytsky had more success with his overture to the Tatar khan, who arrived with a huge following in August 1649. Together they ambushed another Polish army, this time led by King John Casimir in person, near Zboriv on the Strypa river. The resulting ‘Zboriv Agreement’ granted almost everything in Khmelnytsky's ultimatum: a general amnesty, the expulsion of all Jesuits and Jews, and complete toleration. In addition, the new king promised that no Cossack would be tried by non-Cossacks; no royal troops would b
e stationed in Ukraine; some Orthodox bishops could sit in the Diet; no Jewish settlement would be allowed in the region; and the number of registered Cossacks entitled to government pay would rise to 40,000 – a huge increase that in effect made Khmelnytsky (now confirmed as Hetman) the head of a new autonomous unit within the composite Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.67
The Zboriv agreement solved nothing. The Tatars forced Khmelnytsky to allow them to enslave numerous Christian families as the price of their withdrawal to the Crimea, which caused general outrage; while the Diet refused to ratify the king's concession that Orthodox bishops could join its deliberations, and instead voted money to raise a new army which in 1651 defeated the Cossacks and their Tatar allies and occupied Kiev. Khmelnytsky reluctantly signed a treaty that conceded some territory to the Commonwealth and reduced the number of Cossacks on the ‘register’. At the same time, however, the Hetman renewed his plea for Tsar Alexei to send military assistance.
The Tipping Point: The Commonwealth dismembered
This time the tsar was more sympathetic. According to Peter Loofeldt, a Swedish diplomat in Russia, no sooner had Morozov returned to Alexei's side than he welcomed the chance ‘to seek war with Poland over the disputed borders’ as a means of diverting the ‘increased hatred and resistance’ directed towards him. But, Loofeldt continued, when Alexei asked the Zemskii Sobor to discuss assisting the Cossacks, ‘The secular lords protested strongly against war, saying that “it is indeed easy to pull the sword from the scabbard, but not so easy to put it back when you want, and that the outcome of war was uncertain”’.68 Only an unrelated religious development undermined this consensus and allowed Morozov to get his way.
In 1652 Alexei appointed the zealous monk Nikon as Patriarch of Moscow and encouraged him to undertake a comprehensive campaign of church reform. Nikon aimed to improve the behaviour of the laity: there must be no smoking or swearing; no working on Sundays; no ‘pagan’ practices (such as celebrating the winter solstice and staging carnivals during Lent); and limited liquor sales (one store in each town and one bottle per customer at a time, with no liquor sales at all on Sundays, holidays, or during Lent). Nikon also tried to raise clerical standards (censuring drunken priests, demanding that the holy offices be chanted audibly) and to demonstrate that the Russian Church was the one true descendant of the Church of the Apostles. To this end he introduced liturgical practices from Greek Orthodox communities; he collected and ritually defaced all icons painted in the Western style; and he sponsored Old Testament imagery suggesting that Moscow had become the New Jerusalem – a conceit most clearly expressed in the vast monastic complex that he constructed just west of Moscow, which included features named for the River Jordan, Golgotha, Nazareth and, at its centre, a cathedral closely modelled on the church of the Holy Sepulchre. On his first visit, Tsar Alexei named the complex ‘New Jerusalem’ (the name by which it is still known).