The service and homeliness of Bogdan Khmelnitsky. – Collision with Chaplinsky. - Flight to Zaporozhye. – Khmelnytsky’s diplomacy and preparations for the uprising. – Tugai Bey and Crimean aid. – The oversight of the Polish hetmans and the transfer of registers. – Victories of Zheltovodsk and Korsun. – Spread of the Khmelnitsky uprising throughout Ukraine. - Polish kinglessness. – Prince Jeremiah Vishnevetsky. – Three Polish regimentaries and their defeat at Pilyavtsy. – Bogdan’s retreat from Lvov and Zamosc. - The general movement of people into the ranks of the army and the multiplication of registered regiments. – The ruinousness of Tatar aid. - New king. – Adam Kisel and the truce. - People's murmur. – Siege of Zbarazh and Zborovsky Treaty. - Mutual displeasure against him. – Unofficial subordination of Bohdan Khmelnytsky to the Sultan. - Resumption of war. – The defeat at Berestechko and the Treaty of Belotserkov. – The marriage of Timofey Khmelnitsky and his death in Moldova. – Treason of Islam-Girey and the Zhvanetsky Treaty.
Ukraine on the eve of the Khmelnitsky uprising
Almost ten years have passed since the defeat at Ust-Starets. The ill-fated Ukraine languished under double oppression, Polish and Jewish. Polish castles and noble estates multiplied and flourished with the free labor and sweat of the Little Russian people. But the deathly silence that prevailed in the region and the outward humility of these people deceived the arrogant gentlemen and the frivolous gentry. Hatred towards foreign and heterodox oppressors and a passionate thirst for liberation from them grew in the people's hearts. The ground was ready for a new, more terrible uprising. All that was needed was a spark to produce a huge, all-destroying fire; All that was needed was a man to raise the whole people and carry them along with him. Finally, such a person appeared in the person of our old friend, Bogdan Khmelnitsky.
As often happens in history, personal resentment, personal scores called him to decisive actions, which served as the beginning of great events; for they deeply touched the fraught soil of popular thoughts and aspirations.
Zinovy or Bogdan belonged to a noble Cossack family and was the son of the Chigirin centurion Mikhail Khmelnitsky. According to some reports, the gifted young man successfully studied in Lvov or Kiev schools, so that he subsequently stood out not only for his intelligence, but also for his education among the registered Cossacks. Together with his father, Bogdan participated in the Battle of Tsetsor, where the father fell and the son was taken into Tatar-Turkish captivity. He spent two years in this captivity until he managed to be freed (or ransomed); there he could become closely acquainted with Tatar customs and language and even establish friendly relations with some noble persons. All this was very useful to him later. In the era of previous Cossack uprisings, he faithfully served the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a registry against his relatives. For some time he held the position of military clerk; and in the era of pacification he is the same Chigirinsky centurion as his father was. From this latter he also inherited a rather significant estate, located above the Tyasmin River, about five versts from Chigirin. Mikhail Khmelnitsky founded the settlement of Subotovo here. He received this estate for his military merits, taking advantage of the favor of the great crown hetman Stanislav Konetspolsky, headman of Chigirinsky. They say that the hetman even made Mikhail his under-elder. But this hetman's disposition did not pass from father to son. But Bogdan was not only known to King Vladislav himself, but also received trust and honor from him.
Around that time, the Republic of Venice, pressed by the Turks in its maritime trade and its Mediterranean possessions, decided to arm a large European league against them, and turned to the Polish Commonwealth. The Venetian ambassador Tiepolo, supported by the papal nuncio, zealously encouraged Vladislav IV to conclude an alliance against the Turks and Crimean Tatars, and pointed out to him the possibility of attracting the Tsar of Moscow, the rulers of Moldavia and Wallachia to this alliance. A decisive struggle against the Ottoman Empire had long been the cherished dream of the war-loving Polish king; but what could he do without the consent of the Senate and the Diet? And neither the nobles nor the gentry resolutely wanted to burden themselves with any sacrifices for the sake of this difficult struggle and deprive themselves of the peace so dear to them. Among the nobles, the king managed, however, to win over the crown chancellor Ossolinsky and the crown hetman Konetspolsky to his side. A secret agreement was concluded with Tiepolo, according to which Venice undertook to pay 500,000 thalers for military expenses for two years; Military preparations began and the hiring of zholners began under the pretext of necessary measures against the Crimean raids. They decided to let the Cossacks from the Dnieper into the Black Sea; which Tiepolo especially insisted on, hoping to distract the naval forces of the Turks, who were going to take the island of Crete from the Venetians. But in the midst of these negotiations and preparations, in March 1646, Crown Hetman Stanislav Konetspolsky suddenly died, two weeks after (and evil tongues said, as a result of) his marriage, which he entered into in his old age with the young Princess Lubomirskaya. With him, the king was deprived of the main support of his planned enterprise; however, he did not suddenly abandon it and continued military preparations. In addition to the Venetian subsidy, they received part of the dowry of Vladislav’s second wife, the French princess Maria Ludovica Gonzaga, whom he had married in the previous year 1645. Through proxies, the king entered into secret negotiations with some members of the Cossack elders, mainly with the Cherkasy colonel Barabash and the Chigirin centurion Khmelnitsky, who were awarded a certain amount of money and written privileges to build a large number of boats for the Cossack Black Sea campaign.
Meanwhile, the king’s intentions and preparations, of course, did not remain secret for long and aroused strong opposition among the senators and gentry. At the head of this opposition were such influential nobles as the Lithuanian Chancellor Albrecht Radivil, Crown Marshal Luka Stalinsky, Russian governor Jeremiah Vishnewiecki, and Krakow governor Stan. Lubomirski, Castellan of Krakow Jacob Sobieski. The Polish Crown Hetman Nikolai Pototsky, now Konetspolsky's successor, also found himself on the side of the opposition. Chancellor Ossolinsky himself gave in to the stormy expressions of the dissatisfied, who were already accusing the king of intending to usurp absolute power with the help of mercenary troops. In view of such resistance, the king did not find anything better to do than to solemnly and in writing reject his warlike plans and disband part of the assembled troops. And the Warsaw Sejm, which existed at the end of 1646, went further and decided not only the complete dissolution of the hired troops, but also the reduction of the royal guard itself, as well as the removal of all foreigners from the king.
Personality and life of Bogdan Khmelnitsky
Under such political circumstances, Bogdan Khmelnitsky broke his ties with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and headed a new Cossack uprising. This era of his life has largely become the property of legend and it is difficult to restore its historical details. Therefore, we can trace it only in general, most reliable outlines.
By all indications, Bogdan was not only a brave, efficient Cossack, but also a homely owner. He managed to bring his Subotovo estate into a flourishing state and populated it with quitrent people. In addition, he procured from the king another neighboring steppe plot that lay across the river, where he set up apiaries, a threshing floor and started a farmstead, apparently called Subotovka. He also had his own house in the city of Chigirin. But he stayed mainly in Subotov. Here his hospitable courtyard, filled with servants, livestock, bread and all kinds of supplies, represented an example of a prosperous Ukrainian economy. And Bogdan himself, being already a widow, having two young sons, Timofey and Yuri, obviously enjoyed honor and respect in his district both due to his property status, and even more so due to his intelligence, education and as an experienced, experienced person. The registered Cossack elder of that time had already managed to stand out so much from among the Little Russian people that she noticeably tried to join the privileged class of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, that is, to the pan-gentry, which she imitated in language, in her way of life, and in her possessive relations with the Polish-Lithuanian Empire. or the common people. Such was Khmelnitsky, and if his ambition was far from being satisfied, it was because, despite his merits, he still had not received either a colonel or even a sub-starostin rank, due to the dislike of the closest Polish authorities towards him. It was precisely this reluctance that caused the fatal clash.
After the death of the crown hetman Stanislav Konetspolsky, the Chigirin eldership passed to his son Alexander, the crown cornet. The latter left as his manager or sub-elder a certain nobleman summoned from the city. Principality of Lithuania, named Daniil Chaplinsky. This Chaplinsky was distinguished by his daring character and passion for profit and theft, but he was a clever man and knew how to please the old hetman, and even more so his young heir. He was an ardent Catholic, a hater of Orthodoxy, and allowed himself to mock priests. Generally hostile to the Cossacks, he especially disliked Khmelnitsky, either because he envied his property status and public honor or because rivalry arose between them in relation to an orphan girl who was brought up in Bogdan’s family. It is possible to allow both. The Chigirinsky sub-elder began to oppress the Chigirinsky centurion in every way, and declared a claim to his Subotovskoye estate, or at least to a certain part, and lured him out of the crown privileges for this estate and did not return it. Once, in the absence of Khmelnitsky, Chaplinsky raided Subotovo, burned stacks of bread and kidnapped the aforementioned girl, whom he made his wife. Another time, in Chigirin, he grabbed Bogdanov’s eldest son, the teenager Timofey, and ordered him to be brutally flogged with rods in public in the market. Then he captured Bogdan himself, kept him in prison for several days and released him only at the request of his wife. More than once attempts were made on his very life. For example, once on a campaign against the Tatars, some minion of the sub-elder drove into Khmelnitsky’s rear and hit him on the head with a saber, but the iron cap protected him from death, and the villain apologized by mistaking him for a Tatar.
In vain Khmelnitsky appealed with complaints to the elder Konetspolsky, and to the head of the registry or the Polish commissar Shemberg, and to the crown hetman Pototsky: he did not find any justice for Chaplinsky. Finally, Bogdan went to Warsaw and turned to King Vladislav himself, from whom he already had a well-known instruction regarding the Black Sea campaign against the Turks. But the king, due to his insignificant power, could not save Khmelnitsky and the Cossacks in general from the lord’s grievances; they say that, in his irritation against the nobles, he pointed to his saber, reminding him that the Cossacks themselves were warriors. However, the aforementioned order, which was not kept secret, probably even more prompted some lords to take Chaplinsky’s side in his dispute with Khmelnitsky over the ownership of Subotov. Chaplinsky, apparently, managed to present the latter as a man dangerous for the Poles and plotting something against them. It is not surprising, therefore, that the crown hetman Potocki and the cornet Konetspolsky ordered the Chigirinsky colonel Krechovsky to take Khmelnytsky into custody. Favored by this latter, the colonel then begged to be given some freedom on his own guarantee.
Flight of Bogdan to Zaporozhye
Bogdan clearly saw that the said gentlemen would not leave him alone until they finished him off; and therefore, taking advantage of this freedom, he decided to take a desperate step: to go to Zaporozhye and from there raise a new uprising. In order not to come to the Cossacks empty-handed, before leaving his nest, he, with the help of cunning, took possession of some royal charters or privileges (including a charter for the construction of boats for the Black Sea campaign), which were kept by. Cherkasy Colonel Barabash. They say that on the feast of St. Nicholas, December 6, 1647, Bogdan called his now named friend and godfather to Chigirin, gave him a drink and put him to bed; He took the sleepy man’s hat and khustka or scarf (according to another version, the key to the hideout) and sent a messenger to Cherkassk, to the colonel’s wife with an order on behalf of her husband to obtain the said privileges and hand them over to the messenger. In the morning, before Barabash woke up, the letters were already in Bogdan’s hands. Then, without wasting time, he and his son Timofey, with a certain number of registered Cossacks loyal to him and with several servants rode straight to Zaporozhye.
Having traveled about 200 versts along the steppe routes, Bogdan first landed on the island of Butske or Tomakovka. The Cossacks who were here belonged to those who, several years ago, under the command of Ataman Lynchay, rebelled against Barabash and the other registry foreman for her excessive selfishness and servility to the Poles. Khmelnitsky also took part in pacifying this rebellion. Although the Lynchians did not refuse him hospitality, they were suspicious of him. In addition, on Tomakovka there was a pledge or another guard from the registered Korsun regiment. Therefore, Bogdan soon retired to the Sich itself, which was then located somewhat lower along the Dnieper on a cape or so-called. Nikitin Roge. According to custom, in the winter, a small number of Cossacks remained in the Sich to guard it, with a Koshevo ataman and a foreman, while the rest dispersed to their steppe farms and winter quarters. The cautious, prudent Bogdan was in no hurry to announce to the Sich members the purpose of his arrival, but for the time being limited himself to mysterious meetings with the Koshevoy and the foreman, gradually introducing them to his plans and gaining their sympathy.
Bogdan’s flight, of course, could not help but cause some alarm in his homeland among the Polish-Cossack authorities. But he skillfully tried, as far as possible, to dispel his fears and reject for the time being the adoption of any energetic measures. For this purpose, experienced in writing, Bogdan sent a whole series of messages or “sheets” to various persons explaining his behavior and his intentions, namely to Colonel Barabash, the Polish Commissioner Shemberg, the Crown Hetman Pototsky and the Chigirinsky headman, the cornet Konetspolsky. In these sheets, he dwells with particular bitterness on the insults and robberies of Chaplinsky, which forced him to seek salvation in flight; Moreover, he connects his personal grievances with the general oppression of the Ukrainian people and Orthodoxy, with the violation of their rights and liberties approved by royal privileges. At the end of his sheets, he notifies about the imminent departure from the Zaporozhian army to His Royal Majesty and the noble senators of a special embassy, which will petition for a new confirmation and better implementation of the said privileges. There is no mention of any threats of retaliation. On the contrary, this is a man, unhappy and persecuted, humbly crying out for justice. Such tactics, by all indications, largely achieved their goal, and even the Polish spies who penetrated into Zaporozhye itself could not yet tell their patrons anything about Khmelnitsky’s plans. However, Bogdan could not yet know and foresee what turn his business would take and what support he would find among the Russian people; and therefore, out of a sense of self-preservation, he had to still have the appearance of humility and devotion to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. So, from the very first steps he showed that he would not be a simple repetition of Tarasov, Pavlyuk, Ostraninov and similar simple-minded, unsophisticated politicians who appeared at the head of unsuccessful Ukrainian rebellions. Taught by their example, he took advantage of the onset of winter to prepare both the people's soil and allies for the fight against Poland by spring.
Union of Bogdan with the Crimean Tatars
Working to stir up the minds of the Ukrainian people through his friends and Zaporozhye envoys, Bogdan, however, did not rely on the Ukrainians alone, but at the same time turned for external help to the place where his predecessors had turned more than once, but without success, namely to the Crimean Horde. And then he set to work with an experienced and skillful hand; Moreover, he took advantage of his personal knowledge of the Horde, its customs and orders, as well as the acquaintances he once acquired in it and, in general, modern political circumstances. But things did not suddenly improve on this side either. Islam-Girey (1644-1654), one of the most remarkable Crimean khans, was then sitting on the khan’s throne. Having once been in Polish captivity, he had the opportunity to better know the situation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the attitude of the Cossacks towards it. Islam-Girey, although he harbored displeasure against King Vladislav, who did not want to pay him the usual funeral, although he was informed by Khmelnitsky about the king’s former intention to send Cossacks against the Tatars and Turks, however, at the beginning of the negotiations he did not attach much importance to the plans and requests of the hitherto little-known Chigirinsky centurion; moreover, he could not undertake a war with Poland without receiving the preliminary consent of the Turkish Sultan; and Poland was then at peace with Porto. At one time, Bogdan considered his situation so difficult that he thought of leaving Zaporozhye and seeking refuge with his loved ones among the Don Cossacks. But love for his homeland and the influx of fugitives like him from Ukraine to Zaporozhye held him back and forced him, before fleeing to the Don, to try his luck in an open military enterprise.
The beginning of the Khmelnytsky uprising
To separate Ukraine from Zaporozhye, as we know, at the beginning of the rapids, the Kodak fortress was built and occupied by a Polish garrison; and behind the thresholds, to directly monitor the Sich, the register regiments took turns keeping guard. At that time, as stated above, this guard was posted by the Korsun regiment; it was located on the large Dnieper island Butsk or Tomakovka, which lay 18 versts above Nikitin Rog, where the Sich was then located. Near Khmelnitsky, up to five hundred Ukrainian fugitives or gultyaev managed to gather, ready to follow him wherever he led. At the end of January or beginning of February 1648, Bogdan, of course, not without an agreement with the Zaporozhye foreman, and probably not without help from her with people and weapons, with his desperate gults suddenly attacked the Korsunites, drove them out of Tomakovka, and became fortified here camp. This first decisive and open blow had a distant echo in Ukraine: on the one hand, it aroused excitement and bold expectations in the hearts of the oppressed Little Russian people, and on the other, it caused great alarm among the Polish inhabitants, gentry and gentry, especially when it became known that that numerous envoys from Zaporozhye from Khmelnytsky scattered throughout Ukrainian villages to incite the people to revolt and recruit new hunters under the banner of Bogdan. Prompted by the strong requests of the alarmed Ukrainian lords and powers, Crown Hetman Nikolai Pototsky gathered his quartz army and took quite impressive precautions. So, he issued a stern universal prohibiting all relations with Khmelnitsky and threatening death to the wives and children who remained at home and deprivation of property to those fellows who decided to flee to Khmelnitsky; to intercept such fugitives, guards were posted along the roads leading to Zaporozhye; The landowners received an invitation to arm only reliable castles, and to remove guns and shells from the unreliable ones on the contrary, to further strengthen and keep the court banners in readiness in order to attach them to the crown army, and to take away weapons from their slaves. By virtue of this order, several thousand samopals were taken from the vast estates of Prince Jeremiah Vishnevetsky alone. However, it can be assumed that the khlops managed to hide even more. These measures, in any case, indicate that the Poles now had to deal not with the former peaceful and almost unarmed Russian village, but with a people who longed for liberation and were accustomed to using firearms. The above measures worked for the first time. Ukrainian peasants continued to maintain outward calm and humility before the lords, and so far only a few thugs, homeless people or who had nothing to lose, continued to leave for Zaporozhye.
Khmelnitsky's squad at that time, apparently, numbered more than one and a half thousand people, and therefore he was diligently engaged in building fortifications around his camp on Tomakovka, deepening ditches and filling palisades; he accumulated food supplies and even set up a gunpowder factory. Hetman Pototsky did not limit himself to taking measures in Ukraine: having not previously responded to Khmelnytsky’s sorrowful messages, he now himself turned to Bogdan and sent to him more than once, offering to calmly return to his homeland and promising a full pardon. Bogdan did not answer anything and even detained the messengers. Pototsky sent captain Khmeletsky for negotiations: the latter gave his word of honor that not a hair would fall from Bogdan’s head if he left the rebellion. But Khmelnitsky knew well what the Polish word was worth, and this time he released the envoys, presenting through them his conditions for reconciliation, which, however, he gave the appearance of a petition: firstly, that the hetman with the crown army should leave Ukraine; secondly, he would remove the Polish colonels and their comrades from the Cossack regiments; thirdly, that the Cossacks should have their rights and liberties returned. This answer makes us guess that Khmelnitsky, by detaining the previous envoys, tried to gain time, and that now, under more favorable circumstances, he spoke in a more decisive tone. The fact is that at this time, precisely in mid-March, Tatar help had already approached him.
Khmelnitsky's first success, i.e., the expulsion of the registry pledge and the seizure of the island of Tomakovka, was not slow to respond in Crimea. The Khan became more accessible to his envoys, and negotiations for help intensified. (According to some not entirely reliable news, Bogdan supposedly at that time managed to go to Crimea and personally get along with the khan). In all likelihood, there was no prohibition from Constantinople when they learned about the efforts of King Vladislav and some nobles to arm the Cossack seagulls and throw them onto the Turkish shores. However, around that time, seven-year-old Mohammed IV appeared on the Sultan’s throne, and Islam-Girey, who already maintained a more independent policy towards the Porte than his predecessors, skillfully took advantage of his youth. This khan was especially prone to raiding neighboring lands to deliver booty to his Tatars, among whom he therefore enjoyed love and devotion. Khmelnitsky deftly touched this weak chord. He incited the Tatars with a promise to give them all future Polish wealth. The negotiations ended with Khmelnitsky sending his young son Timofey as a hostage to the khan and swearing allegiance to an alliance with the Horde (and, perhaps, to some subordination to it). Islam Giray, however, waited for events, and for now did not move with his horde, and by the spring he sent his old friend, the Perekop Murza Tugai Bey, closest to Zaporozhye, with 4,000 Nogais, to the aid of Khmelnitsky. Bogdan hastened to transport some of these Tatars to the right bank of the Dnieper, where they were immediately captured or driven away by Polish guards and thereby opened the way for Ukrainian fugitives to Zaporozhye.
At the same time, the Koshevoy Ataman, by agreement with Khmelnitsky, brought the Cossacks from their winter quarters to the Sich from the banks of the Dnieper, Bug, Samara, Konka, etc. An army of horse and foot gathered, numbering up to ten thousand. When Bogdan arrived here with several ambassadors from Tugai Bey’s horde, cannon shots announced in the evening that the army would gather at the rally the next day. On April 19, early in the morning, cannon shots were heard again, then they hit the boilers; so many people gathered that they couldn’t all fit on the Sich Maidan; and therefore they went beyond the ramparts of the fortress to a neighboring field, and there they opened a meeting. Here the foreman, having announced to the army the beginning of the war with the Poles for the insults and oppression they had caused, reported on the actions and plans of Khmelnitsky and the alliance he had concluded with the Crimea. Probably, Khmelnitsky immediately presented the Cossacks with the royal privileges he had stolen, which the lords did not want to fulfill and even hid them. Extremely excited by all this news and prepared in advance, the Rada unanimously shouted out the election of Khmelnytsky as the head of the entire Zaporozhian army. Koshevoy immediately sent a military clerk with several kuren atamans and a noble fellowship to the military treasury for the hetman's kleynots. They brought a gold-painted banner, a horsetail with a gilded jackdaw, a silver mace, a silver military seal and copper cauldrons with a dovbosh, and handed them to Khmelnitsky. Having finished the meeting, the foreman and part of the Cossacks went to the Sich church, listened to the liturgy and a thanksgiving prayer. Then guns and muskets were fired; after which the Cossacks went to the kurens for lunch, and Khmelnitsky with his retinue dined with the Koschevoy. Having rested after lunch, he and the foreman gathered for a council with the Koshevoy and then decided that one part of the army would set out with Bogdan on a campaign in Ukraine, and the other would disperse again to their fishing and animal industries, but be ready to march at the first request. The foreman hoped that as soon as Bogdan arrived in Ukraine, the city Cossacks would approach him, and his army would greatly increase.
This calculation was well understood by the Polish leaders, and the crown hetman, who at the end of March believed that Khmelnytsky had up to 3000, wrote to the king: “God forbid that he enters Ukraine with them; then these three thousand would quickly increase to 100,000, and what would we do with the rioters? In accordance with this fear, he waited only for spring to move from Ukraine to Zaporozhye and there suppress the uprising in its very bud; and by the way, to distract Zaporozhye, he advised to implement the old idea: to allow them sea raids. But such advice is now too late. Pototsky himself stood with his regiment in Cherkasy, and the full hetman Kalinovsky with his in Korsun; the rest of the crown army was located in Kanev, Boguslav and other nearby places on the right bank of Ukraine.
But there was no agreement between the Polish leaders and lords on the very plan of action.
The Western Russian Orthodox nobleman Adam Kisel, the governor of Bratslav, familiar to us, advised Pototsky not to go beyond the thresholds to look for the rebel there, but rather to caress all the Cossacks and please them with various indulgences and benefits; He advised not to split the small crown army into detachments, to communicate with the Crimea and Ochakov, etc. In the same sense, he wrote to the king. Vladislav IV was then in Vilna and from here he monitored the beginning of the Cossack movement, receiving various reports. The crown hetman announced his plan to go to Khmelnytsky in two departments: one along the steppe, and the other along the Dnieper. After mature reflection, the king agreed with Kisel’s opinion and sent an order not to divide the army and to wait for the campaign. But it was too late: the stubborn and arrogant Pototsky had already moved both detachments forward.
Thanks to the Tatar guards, reports from Polish spies about what was happening in Zaporozhye stopped, and Pototsky did not know about Khmelnitsky’s oncoming movement, or about his connection with Tugai Bey. Bogdan’s enterprise was helped not only by his personal intelligence and experience under favorable political circumstances; but, undoubtedly, a significant amount of blind happiness was also on his side in this era. The main enemy leader, that is, the crown hetman, seemed to have set himself the idea of using all means in his power to facilitate Khmelnitsky’s success and victory. So well did he manage the military forces in his hands! Near both hetmans, well-armed quartz regiments, court banners and registered Cossacks gathered - in total no less than 15,000 selected troops at that time, which in skillful hands could crush some four thousand Bogdanov gultyai and Cossacks, even if reinforced by the same number Nogaev. But disdainful of the enemy’s forces and not listening to the objections of his comrade Kalinovsky, Pototsky thought of taking a simple military walk and, for the sake of the convenience of the campaign, began to split his army. He separated six thousand and sent them forward, entrusting the leadership to his son Stefan, of course, giving him the opportunity to distinguish himself and earn the hetman's mace in advance, and gave him the Cossack commissar Shemberg as his comrade. The majority of this advanced detachment, as if on purpose, was made up of registered Cossack regiments; although at the same time they were again brought to the oath of allegiance to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it was great frivolity to trust them with the first meeting with their indignant relatives. Moreover, the most advanced detachment was divided into two parts: about 4,000 registered Cossacks with a number of hired Germans were put on kayaks or river boats, and the Dnieper from Cherkassy was sent to Kodak with small guns and with stocks of combat and food supplies; and the other part, up to 2,000 hussar and dragoon cavalry, with the young Pototsky, also went along the steppe road to Kodak, under which these two parts were supposed to unite. This second part was supposed to follow not far from the Dnieper bank and constantly maintain contact with the river flotilla. But this connection was soon lost: the cavalry moved slowly and rested; and the flotilla, carried away by the current, went far ahead.
The same Tatar patrols that stopped the Poles from leading from Zaporozhye, on the contrary, helped Bogdan learn in time from intercepted and tortured spies about the hetmans’ campaign and the division of their troops into detachments. For now, he left aside the Kodak fortress with its four-hundred-strong garrison, and also moved along the right bank of the Dnieper towards Stefan Pototsky. It goes without saying that he was not slow to take advantage of a separate flotilla of registered officers, and sent out efficient people who entered into relations with them, and ardently convinced them to stand together in defense of their oppressed people and their trampled Cossack rights against the oppressors. The registered regiments at that time, as is known, were commanded by unloved colonels from the Poles or equally unloved Ukrainians who sided with the Poles, such as Barabash, who was in this flotilla as the eldest, and Ilyash, who held the post of military captain here. Due to Pototsky’s strange carelessness, among the foreman was Krechovsky, who had been deprived of the Chigirinsky regiment after Khmelnitsky’s flight and, of course, was now easily inclined to his side. The convictions, especially the sight of the Tatar horde coming to the rescue, had an effect. The registries were indignant and killed the hired Germans and their bosses, including Barabash and Ilyash. After that, with the help of their ships, they transported the rest of the Tatars of Tugai Bey to the right bank; and these latter, with the help of their horses, helped them immediately join Khmelnitsky’s camp; guns, food and military supplies were also delivered there from the ships.
Battle of the Yellow Waters
Thus, when Stefan Pototsky collided with Khmelnitsky, he and his 2,000 found themselves against 10 or 12 thousand enemies. But the change in numbers did not stop there either. The registered Cossacks and dragoons, recruited from Ukrainians, who were in the land detachment, were not slow in moving to Khmelnitsky. Only the Polish banners remained with Potocki, containing less than one thousand people. The meeting took place on the swampy banks of the Yellow Waters, the left tributary of the Ingulets. Despite the small number of their squad, young Pototsky and his comrades did not lose courage; They surrounded themselves with a camp of carts, quickly erected trenches or trenches, placed cannons on them and undertook a desperate defense in the hope of rescue from the main army, where they sent a messenger with the news. But this messenger, intercepted by Tatar riders, was shown to the Poles from afar so that they would abandon all hope of help. For several days they defended themselves bravely; The lack of food and military supplies forced them to negotiate. Khmelnitsky first demanded the release of guns and hostages; Pototsky agreed all the more easily because without gunpowder the guns were already useless. Negotiations, however, ended in nothing, and the battle resumed. The heavily pressed Poles decided to begin a retreat, and in a camp they moved across the Princely Bayraki gully; but here they found themselves in the most inconvenient terrain, were surrounded by Cossacks and Tatars and, after a desperate defense, were partly exterminated and partly taken prisoner. Among the latter were: Stefan Potocki himself, who soon died from his wounds, the Cossack commissar Shemberg, Jan Sapieha, the later famous hussar colonel Stefan Czarnecki, the no less famous Jan Vygowski and some other representatives of the Polish and Western Russian knighthood. This pogrom took place around May 5th.
When a handful of Polish zholners died in an unequal battle, the hetmans with the main army blithely stood not far from Chigirin, and spent a significant part of their time in drinking bouts and banquets; their huge convoy was replete with barrels of honey and wine. The Ukrainian lords who united with them flaunted to each other not only the luxury of their weapons and harness, but also an abundance of all kinds of supplies, expensive dishes and a multitude of parasitic servants. The flatterers and hangers-on tried to joke about the pitiful gultyaev, which, in all likelihood, the advance detachment had already defeated and, burdened with booty, was now amusing itself with the lions in the steppes, in no hurry to send news. However, this rather long absence of news from his son began to worry old Potocki. There were already some alarming rumors going around; but they were not yet believed. Suddenly a messenger from Grodzitsky, the commandant of the Kodatsky fortress, rode up to him with a letter notifying him of the union of the Tatars with the Cossacks, of the betrayal of the river department and the transfer of the registries to Khmelnitsky’s side; in conclusion, of course, he asked for reinforcements for his garrison. This news struck the hetman like thunder; from his usual arrogance and self-confidence, he immediately switched to cowardly despair for the fate of his son. But instead of rushing to his aid, while there was still time and a handful of brave men still held out, he began to write to the king through Chancellor Ossolinsky, portraying his homeland in extreme danger from the union of the horde with the Cossacks and begging him to hurry with the destruction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; Otherwise, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth will perish! And then he set out on a return trip to Cherkasy, and only then the few fugitives who escaped the Zheltovodsk pogrom overtook him. The hetmans hastily retreated further, to the middle of the Polish possessions, and stopped in thought on the banks of the Ros, near the city of Korsun. Here they dug in, having up to 7,000 good troops, and expected Prince Jeremiah Vishnevetsky with his six thousand-strong detachment to come to their aid.
Battle of Korsun
Khmelnytsky and Tugai Bey remained for three days at the site of their Zheltovodsk victory, preparing for a further campaign and organizing their army, which was significantly increased by the newly arrived Tatars and Ukrainian rebels. Then they hurried after the retreating hetmans, and in mid-May they appeared before Korsun. The first attacks on the fortified Polish camp were met with frequent cannon fire, from which the attackers suffered significant losses. Polish riders captured several Tatars and one Cossack. The hetman ordered them to be interrogated under torture about the number of enemies. The Cossack assured that 15,000 Ukrainians alone came, and more and more tens of thousands of Tatars came. The gullible and frivolous Potocki was horrified at the thought that the enemy would surround him on all sides, put him under siege and lead him to starvation; and then someone else notified him that the Cossacks wanted to lower the Ros and take away the water from the Poles, for which work had already begun. The hetman completely lost his head and decided to leave his trenches. It was in vain that his comrade Kalinovsky insisted on fighting a decisive battle the next day. Pototsky would never agree to such a risky step, especially since the next day was Monday. In response to Kalinovsky’s objections, he shouted: “I’m a peasant here, and in my parish the vicar must be silent in front of me!” The army was ordered to leave the heavy carts and take only the light ones for the camp, a certain number for each banner. On Tuesday, early in the morning, the army left the camp and set out on a campaign to Boguslav in a camp arranged in 8 detachments with cannons, infantry and dragoons in the front and rear ranks and with armored or hussar cavalry on the sides. But it generally moved heavily and discordantly, poorly led. The Great Crown Hetman, suffering from gout, rode half-drunk in his carriage as usual; but the full hetman was little obeyed; Moreover, he did not have good eyesight and was shortsighted. There were two roads leading to Boguslav, one through fields, straight and open, the other through forests and hills, roundabout. And then Pototsky made the most unfortunate choice: he ordered to take the last road, as it was more protected from enemies. Among the crown army there still remained a number of registered Cossacks, whom the hetman continued to trust, despite the events, and even from among them guides were chosen for this roundabout road. These Cossacks had already let Khmelnitsky know the day before about the upcoming campaign for tomorrow and its direction. And he was not slow to take his measures. Part of the Cossack and Tatar army secretly that same night hurried to occupy some places along this road, set up ambushes, abatis there, dig ditches and build ramparts. The Cossacks paid special attention to the so-called Steep Balka, which they dug across with a deep ditch with trenches.
As soon as the camp entered the forest area, Cossacks and Tatars attacked it from both sides, showering it with bullets and arrows. Several hundred registered Cossacks and Ukrainian dragoons remaining with the Poles took advantage of the first confusion to join the ranks of the attackers.
Tabor somehow still moved and defended himself until he approached Krutaya Balka. Here he could not overcome the wide and deep ditch. The front carts that had descended into the valley stopped, and the rear ones from the mountain continued to quickly move towards them. There was a terrible commotion. Cossacks and Tatars began to storm this camp from all sides, and finally completely tore it apart and destroyed it. The extermination of the Poles was facilitated by the same extravagant hetman, who strictly ordered the knighthood to dismount from their horses and defend in an unusual formation on foot. Only those who did not listen to this order were saved, and a certain number of servants who led the master’s horses and used them to escape. The entire camp and many prisoners became the prey of the victors. Among the latter were both hetmans; of the most prominent lords shared their fate: the castellan of Chernigov, Jan Odzhivolsky, the chief of artillery Dengof, the young Senyavsky, Khmeletsky, etc. According to a pre-made condition, the Cossacks were content with booty from expensive utensils, weapons, harnesses, all kinds of gear and supplies; horses and livestock in general were divided in half with the Tatars; and the yasir or captives were all handed over to the Tatars and taken as slaves to the Crimea, where the wealthy had to wait for ransom, in an amount precisely determined for each. The Korsun pogrom followed about 10 days after the Zheltovodsk pogrom.
Spread of the uprising across Ukraine
What happened was what the Polish hetmans and Ukrainian lords were so afraid of: the uprising began to quickly spread throughout Ukraine. Two defeats of the best Polish army, Zheltovodsk and Korsun, and the captivity of both hetmans made a stunning impression. When the Ukrainian people became convinced with their own eyes that the enemy was not at all as powerful as it had seemed until that time, then the thirst for revenge and freedom, deeply hidden in the people’s hearts, arose with extraordinary force and soon poured over the edge; everywhere began a cruel and bloody reprisal of the rebellious Ukrainian mob against the gentry and the Jews, who did not have time to escape to well-fortified cities and castles. People running away from the lords began to flock to Khmelnitsky’s camp from all sides and enroll as Cossacks. Bogdan, having moved his convoy from Korsun up the Ros, to Bila Tserkva, found himself at the head of a large army, which he began to organize and arm with the help of weapons, cannons and shells captured from the Poles. Having accepted the title of hetman of the Zaporozhye army, he, in addition to the former six registered regiments, began to organize new regiments; appointed colonels, esauls and centurions with his own authority. From here he sent his envoys and generals throughout Ukraine, calling on the Russian people to unite and unanimously rise against their oppressors, the Poles and Jews, but not against the king, who allegedly himself favored the Cossacks. The new Cossack hetman was obviously taken by surprise by the unexpected luck and was still unclear about his further goals; moreover, as an experienced and elderly man, he did not trust the constancy of happiness, even less the constancy of his predatory allies the Tatars, and was afraid to call upon himself to fight all the forces and means of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with which he was quite familiar. Therefore, it is not surprising that his further diplomatic attempts to weaken the impression of events in the eyes of the Polish king and the Polish nobility and to warn the general militia or “Pospolite Rushene” against him. From Bila Tserkva he wrote a respectful message to King Vladislav, in which he explained his actions by the same reasons and circumstances, i.e. intolerable oppression from the Polish lords and officers, humbly asked the king for forgiveness, promised to serve him faithfully in the future and begged him to return the Zaporozhye army his old rights and privileges. From this we can conclude that he has not yet thought of breaking the connection between Ukraine and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. But this message no longer found the king alive. The indomitable Sejm opposition, failures, and sorrows of recent years had a very harmful effect on the health of Vladislav, who had not yet reached old age. The loss of his seven-year-old dearly beloved son Sigismund, in whom he saw his successor, had a particularly depressing effect on him. The beginning of the Ukrainian rebellion, raised by Khmelnitsky, greatly alarmed the king. From Vilna, half-sick, he went with his court to Warsaw; but on the way, an intensified illness detained him in the town of Merechi, where he died on May 10, therefore, before he lived to see the Korsun defeat; We don’t know whether he managed to receive news of the Zheltovodsk pogrom. This unexpected death of such a king as Vladislav was was a new and perhaps the happiest circumstance for Khmelnitsky. An era of kinglessness with all its worries and turmoil has arrived in Poland; the state at this time was least capable of energetically suppressing the Ukrainian uprising.
Not limiting himself to a message to the king, Khmelnitsky, prolific in letters, at the same time addressed similar conciliatory messages to Prince Dominic Zaslavsky, Prince Jeremiah Vishnevetsky and some other gentlemen. Prince Vishnevetsky treated his envoys most severely. He was about to go to the aid of the hetmans when he learned of their defeat at Korsun. Instead of any answer, the prince ordered Khmelnitsky to execute his envoys; and then, seeing his huge left-bank possessions engulfed in rebellion, he left his residence of Lubny with 6,000 of his own well-armed troops, headed to Kiev Polesie, and near Lyubech crossed to the right side of the Dnieper. He also had extensive possessions in the Kiev region and Volyn, and here he began an energetic struggle with the Ukrainian people, calling under his banner the Polish gentry, expelled from their Ukrainian estates. In his cruelty he surpassed the rebels, without mercy destroying with fire and sword all the villages and inhabitants that fell into his hands. Khmelnitsky, sending detachments in different directions to support the Ukrainians, sent one of his most enterprising colonels, Maxim Krivonos, against Vishnevetsky, and for some time these two opponents fought with varying happiness, competing with each other in the destruction of the cities and castles of Podolia and Volyn. In other places in the same regions, as well as in the Kiev region, Polesie and Lithuania, colonels Krechovsky, Ganzha, Sangirey, Ostap, Golota and others acted more or less successfully. Many cities and castles passed into the hands of the Cossacks, thanks to the assistance of the Orthodox part of their population. During this era, the notorious Kodak fortress fell into the hands of the Cossacks; The Nezhinsky regiment was sent to get it.
The envoys sent by Khmelnitsky with a letter to the king and a statement of Cossack complaints, after the death of this latter, were supposed to present this letter and complaints to the Senate or Panama Rada, at the head of which during the absence of a king there was usually a primate, i.e. Archbishop of Gnezdinsky, who at that time had the role of royal governor. At that time, the elderly Matvey Lubensky was primate. The senators who gathered in Warsaw for the convocation diet were in no hurry to respond and, wanting to gain time before the election of a new king, entered into negotiations with Khmelnitsky; for which they appointed a special commission headed by the famous Adam Kisel. Getting ready for the Cossack camp, Kisel immediately entered into negotiations with Bogdan, sent him his eloquent messages and convinced him to return to the bosom of their common motherland, that is, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Khmelnitsky was not inferior to him in the art of writing humble, affectionate, but meaningless messages. However, during the negotiations they agreed to observe a kind of truce, but it did not materialize. Prince Jeremiah Vishnevetsky did not pay any attention to him and continued military operations; a detachment of his troops, in the eyes of Kisel, attacked Ostrog, occupied by the Cossacks. Vishnevetsky is still rampant, hanging and impaling Ukrainians. Krivonos takes the city of Bar; other Cossack detachments captured Lutsk, Klevan, Olyka, etc. The Cossacks and the embassy, in turn, raged against the gentry, and took the gentry as wives, and in particular mercilessly slaughtered the railways. To save their lives, many Jews converted to Christianity, but mostly feignedly, and, having fled to Poland, there they returned to the faith of their fathers. Chroniclers say that at this time there was not a single railway left in Ukraine. In the same way, the gentry, leaving their estates, rushed to escape with their wives and children into the depths of Poland; and those who fell into the hands of the rebel slaves were mercilessly beaten.
Meanwhile, the Senate took some diplomatic and military measures. He began to write notes to the Crimea, Constantinople, the rulers of Voloshsky and Moldavsky, the border Moscow governors, inclining everyone to peace or help from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and blaming the traitor and rebel Khmelnitsky for everything. At the same time, the lords with their armed detachments were ordered to gather in Glinany, not far from Lvov. Since both hetmans were in captivity, they had to appoint successors or deputies. The general voice of the gentry pointed primarily to the Russian governor, Prince Jeremiah Vishnevetsky; but with his arrogant, tough and grumpy character, he made many enemies among the noble gentlemen; among them was the crown chancellor Ossolinsky. The Senate resorted to an extraordinary measure: instead of two hetmans, it appointed three commanders or regimentaries to the army; namely: the governor of the Sendomierz prince Dominik Zaslavsky, the crown prince Ostrorog and the crown cornet Alexander Konetspolsky. This unsuccessful triumvirate became the subject of ridicule and witticisms. The Cossacks gave its members the following nicknames: Prince Zaslavsky was called “perina” for his affectionate, gentle disposition and wealth, Ostrorog - “Latin” for his ability to speak a lot in Latin, and Konetspolsky - “child” because of his youth and lack of talent. Vishnevetsky was appointed only one of the military commissars assigned to assist the three regimintars. The proud governor did not suddenly reconcile himself with such appointments and for some time kept himself apart from his army. Some of the lords with their court banners and the district militia also joined him; the other part connected with the regimintars. Both armies finally came together, and then a force of 30-40,000 well-arranged zholners alone was formed, not counting a large number of armed baggage servants. The Polish lords gathered for this war with great pomp: they appeared in traveling outfits and rich weapons, with many servants and carts, abundantly loaded with food and drink supplies and tableware. In the camp they had feasts and drinking parties; their self-confidence and carelessness greatly increased at the sight of such a large army assembled.
Khmelnitsky is reproached for the fact that he lost a lot of time in Bila Tserkva, did not take advantage of his victories, and after Korsun did not rush into the depths of then almost defenseless Poland in order to end the war there with a decisive blow. But such an accusation is hardly entirely justified. The Cossack leader had to organize an army and settle all sorts of internal and external affairs in Ukraine; and his victorious march could be slowed down by large oncoming fortresses. Moreover, the Poles’ appeals to Crimea and Constantinople did not remain fruitless. The Sultan was still hesitant to take the side of the rebel and restrained the khan from further aid to Khmelnitsky. The Moscow government, although sympathetic to his uprising, looked askance at his alliance with the infidels. However, it did not provide assistance against the Crimeans, which the Poles demanded on the basis of the last treaty concluded by A. Kisel, but only posted an observation army near the border. Khmelnitsky's skillful negotiations with Constantinople and Bakhchisarai, however, little by little led to the fact that the khan, having received the consent of the Sultan, again moved the horde to help the Cossacks, and this time in much larger numbers.
In anticipation of this help, Khmelnitsky again set out on a campaign, headed to Konstantinov and took this city. But, having learned about the proximity of the enemy army and not yet having the Tatars at hand, he retreated and became a convoy near Pilyavtsy. The Poles took back Konstantinov and set up a fortification camp here. There were frequent meetings and debates among the military leaders about whether to remain in this place convenient for defense or to advance further. More cautious ones, including Vishnevetsky, advised to stay and not go to Pilyavtsy, a very rugged and swampy area lying at the headwaters of the Sluch. But their opponents overpowered them, and it was decided to advance further. The Polish multi-command and incapable triumvirate greatly favored Khmelnitsky's cause.
Near Pilyavtsy, the Polish army became a convoy not far from the Cossack army in a cramped and inconvenient place. Daily skirmishes and sporadic attacks began; The regimentaries, knowing that the horde had not yet arrived, were all going to attack with all their might the fortified Cossack camp and the small Pilyavetsky fortress, which they contemptuously called “kurnik,” but everyone somehow hesitated; and Khmelnitsky also avoided a decisive battle, expecting a horde. With his characteristic resourcefulness, he resorted to cunning. On September 21 (new style) on Monday, at sunset, a 3,000-strong advanced Tatar detachment approached him; and the khan was supposed to appear in another three days. Khmelnitsky met the detachment with cannon fire and great noise, which lasted the whole night, as if the Khan himself had arrived with the horde; which has already raised alarm in the Polish camp. The next day, numerous crowds of Tatars poured out against the Poles, shouting “Allah! Allah!" The isolated skirmishes that ensued soon, thanks to reinforcements from both sides, turned into a big battle; it was unsuccessful for the Poles, whose leaders were clearly timid and did not support each other well. They were so little informed that they mistook for the Horde a Cossack golota dressed in Tatar rags, who, together with the Tatars, called on Allah for help. And Khmelnytsky encouraged the Cossack regiments with his usual cry: “For the faith, well done, for the faith!” Knocked off the field and convinced of the disadvantage of their location, the Poles lost heart. At the end of the battle, the regimentars, commissars and chief colonels, without dismounting their horses, held a military rally. It was decided to retreat as a camp to Konstantinov in order to take a more comfortable position, and the order was given to make a camp that night, that is, to set up the cart in a certain order. But some noble gentlemen, with Prince Dominic himself at their head, trembling for their dear belongings, slowly, under the cover of darkness, sent him forward, and they themselves followed him. The mere movement of carts for the camp in the darkness of the night created considerable chaos; and when the news spread that the commanders were fleeing and leaving the army to sacrifice to the Tatar horde, he was seized by a terrible panic; the slogan “Save yourself who can!” was heard. Entire banners rushed onto their horses and indulged in a desperate gallop. The bravest, including Jeremiah Vishnevetsky, were carried away by the general flow and fled shamefully so as not to be captured by the Tatars.
On the morning of Wednesday, September 23, the Cossacks found the Polish camp deserted and at first did not believe their eyes, fearing an ambush. Convinced of the reality, they diligently began to unload Polish carts filled with all sorts of goods. Never before or since have they obtained such a huge prize so easily. There were several thousand of the carts, shod with iron, called “skarbniks”. The hetman's mace, gilded and decorated with expensive stones, was also found in the camp. After Korsun and Pilyavitsy, the Cossacks wore rich Polish attire; and they collected so many gold and silver items and dishes that they sold whole heaps of them to Kyiv and other nearby merchants for a cheap price. The covetous Khmelnitsky, of course, took the lion's share of this loot. After Zheltye Vody and Korsun, having reoccupied his Subotov estate and the Chigirinsky courtyard, he now sent there, as they say, several barrels filled with silver, some of which he ordered to be buried in hidden places. But even more important than wealth was the high importance that the three-time winner of the Poles now received in the eyes of not only his people, but also all his neighbors. When, on the third day after the flight of the Poles, a horde arrived near Pilyavtsy with the Kalga Sultan and Tugai Bey, it seemed that Poland was no longer able to fight the powerful Cossack hetman. She did not have a ready army, and the road to her very heart, that is, to Warsaw, was open. Khmelnitsky, together with the Tatars, actually moved in that direction; but on the way to the capital it was necessary to capture two strong points, Lvov and Zamosc.
Khmelnitsky's campaign to Lvov
One of the richest trading cities of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Lviv at the same time was well fortified, equipped with a sufficient number of cannons and shells; and its garrison was reinforced by part of the Polish fugitives from near Pilyavitsy. But in vain the Lvov city authorities begged Jeremiah Vishnevetsky to take over their leadership; the gentry who gathered around him even proclaimed him the great crown hetman. He only helped to organize the defense and then left; and the leadership here was handed over to Christopher Grodzitsky, skilled in military affairs. The population of Lvov, consisting of Catholics, Uniates, Armenians, Jews and Orthodox Rusyns, armed themselves, collected large sums of money for military expenses and quite unanimously decided to defend themselves to the last extreme. The Orthodox themselves were forced to hide their sympathy for the Cossack cause and help the defense in view of the decisive predominance and animation of the Catholics. Soon hordes of Tatar and Cossacks appeared; They burst into the outskirts and began a siege of the city and the upper castle. But the citizens defended themselves courageously, and the siege dragged on. Having stood here for more than three weeks, Khmelnitsky, apparently sparing the city and avoiding a decisive attack, agreed to take a large payback (700,000 Polish zlotys), and, sharing it with the Tatars, removed his camp on October 24.
Siege of Zamosc
Kalga Sultan, burdened with booty and captives, moved towards Kamenets; and Khmelnitsky with Tugay Bey went to the Zamosc fortress, which he besieged with his main forces; Meanwhile, separate Tatar and Cossack corrals scattered across the neighboring regions of Poland, spreading horror and devastation everywhere.
The invasion of Cossack and Tatar hordes, as well as rumors about the hostile mood of Moscow, and in general the extreme danger in which the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth then found itself, finally forced the Poles to rush to elect a king. The main contenders were two brothers of Vladislav IV: Jan Casimir and Karl Ferdinand. Both of them were in the clergy: Casimir, during his wanderings abroad, entered the Jesuit Order and then received the rank of cardinal from the pope, and after the death of his elder brother, he nominally accepted the title of King of Sweden; and Karl had the rank of bishop (of Wroclaw, then of Plock). The younger brother generously spent his wealth on treating the nobility and on bribery in order to achieve the crown. Some noble gentlemen also supported him, for example, the Russian governor Jeremiah Vishnevetsky, his friend the Kiev governor Tyshkevich, the crown sub-chancellor Leshchinsky, etc. But the party of Jan Casimir was more numerous and stronger. It was headed by the crown chancellor Ossolinsky, and the governor of Bratslav Adam Kisel also belonged to it; she was diligently supported by her influence by the Dowager Queen Maria Gonzaga, together with the French ambassador, who had already drawn up a plan for her future marriage With Casimir. Finally, the Cossacks declared themselves for the latter, and Khmelnitsky, in his messages to the Panama Rada, directly demanded that Jan Casimir be elected king, and Jeremiah Vishnevetsky would not be approved as crown hetman, and only in that case promised to end the war. After many disputes and delays, the senators persuaded Prince Charles to abandon his candidacy, and, on November 17 of the new style, the electoral Warsaw Sejm quite unanimously decided on the choice of Jan Casimir. Three days later, he swore the oath at the usual pacta conventa. These restrictive conditions for the king, however, this time were supplemented by some more: for example, the royal guard could not be composed of foreigners and must take an oath in the name of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Thanks to the courageous defense of the garrison led by Weyer, the siege of Zamosc also dragged on. But Weier urgently demanded help and notified the senators of his plight. Therefore, when the choice of Jan Casimir was assured, the new king, without waiting for the completion of all formalities, hastened to take advantage of Khmelnytsky’s declaration of devotion to himself and sent the Volyn nobleman Smiarovsky, whom he knew, near Zamosc with a letter in which he ordered to immediately lift the siege and return to Ukraine, where to expect commissioners to negotiate peace terms. Khmelnitsky received the royal envoy with honor and expressed his readiness to fulfill the royal will. Some colonels, led by Krivonos, and the convoy Black, objected to the retreat; but the cunning messenger tried to arouse suspicion in Khmelnitsky about the purity of the intentions of Krivonos himself and his supporters. Probably, the onset of winter, the difficulties of the siege and large losses in people also influenced the decision of the hetman, who either did not know or did not want to pay attention to the fact that the fortress was already in dire straits due to the onset of famine. Khmelnitsky presented Smyarovsky with an answer to the king with an expression of his devotion and humility; and on November 24 he retreated from Zamosc, taking from the Zamosc townspeople a small payout for the Tatars of Tugai Bey. The latter went to the steppes, and the Cossack convoy and guns moved to Ukraine. Obviously, the Cossack hetman still hesitated in his ultimate goals, did not find a point of support for the isolation of Little Russia and therefore hesitated to make a complete break with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, expecting something from the newly elected king. In fact, along with the end of Polish kinglessness, the most favorable conditions for the liberation of Ukraine also ceased. The retreat from Lvov and Zamosc is to some extent a turning point from a continuous series of successes to a long, destructive and confusing struggle between two nationalities and two cultures: Russian and Polish.
Liberation of Ukraine from the Poles and organization of the Cossack army
All of Ukraine on the left side of the Dnieper, and along the Sluch and Southern Bug on the right, at this time not only was cleared of Polish lords and Jews, but also all the strong cities and castles in this area were occupied by the Cossacks; the Polish flag was not flying anywhere. Naturally, the Russian people rejoiced that they were freed forever from the Polish-Jewish yoke, and therefore everywhere they triumphantly met and saw off the culprit of their liberation; the priests received him with images and prayers; the students (especially in Kyiv) delivered rhetorical panegyrics to him; and they called him the Roxolan Moses, comparing him with the Maccabees, etc.; the common people greeted him noisily and joyfully. And the hetman himself marched through cities and towns on a richly decorated horse, surrounded by colonels and centurions, sporting luxurious clothes and harnesses; behind him they carried broken Polish banners and maces and carried captive noblewomen, whom noble and even ordinary Cossacks for the most part took as wives. This apparent liberation and these trophies did not cost the people cheap. Fire and sword have already caused considerable devastation in the country; a lot of the population had already died from the sword and captivity, and mainly not from the enemies of the Poles, but from the allies of the Tatars. These predators, so greedy for yasyr, did not limit themselves to the captivity of the Poles, to which they were entitled by condition; and often the native Russian embassy was captured into captivity. They especially took away those young artisans who followed the gentry's fashion and shaved their heads all around, putting a chupryna at the top on the Polish model; the Tatars pretended to take them for Poles.
Be that as it may, Bogdan returned to Ukraine as almost complete master of the country. He stopped by Kyiv and venerated the Kyiv shrines, and then went to his place in Chigirin, where he now founded the hetman’s residence. Only Pereyaslav sometimes shared this honor with Chigirin. If you believe some news, Khmelnitsky’s first order of business upon returning to Ukraine was to marry his old flame and godfather, that is, the wife of the elder Chaplinsky, who had fled, for which he allegedly received permission from a Greek hierarch who was staying in Kyiv on his way to Moscow. Then he continued the organization of the Cossack army that began after Korsun, which kept increasing in size; since not only the mass of the Polish government and peasants, but also many townspeople were assigned to him; and in cities with Magdeburg law, even burgomasters and raisons left their ranks, shaved their beards and pestered the army. According to the chronicler, in every village it was difficult to find someone who either did not go himself, or sent a son, or a young servant to the army; and in another yard everyone left, leaving only one person to look after the household. In addition to the belligerence inherent in the Little Russian people, in addition to the desire to strengthen their liberation from the master's bondage or from serfdom, there was also the lure of huge booty, with which the Cossacks enriched themselves in the Polish convoys after their victories, as well as in the Polish and railway farms that were plundered. Along with the influx of people, the military territory itself expanded. The army could no longer be limited to the previous six local regiments of the Kyiv Voivodeship; another regiment would have more than 20,000 Cossacks, and a hundred more than 1,000. Now, on both sides of the Dnieper, new regiments were gradually formed, named after their main cities. Actually, on the right bank of Ukraine, five or six regiments were added, which are: Umansky, Lisyansky, Pavolotsky, Kalnitsky and Kyiv, and even Ovruchsky in Polesie. They multiplied mainly in the left-bank Ukraine, where before Khmelnitsky there was only one complete one, Pereyaslavsky; now regiments have formed there: Nezhinsky, Chernigovsky, Prilutsky, Mirgorodsky, Poltava, Irkleevsky, Ichansky and Zenkovsky. In total, therefore, up to 20 or more registered regiments appeared in this era. Each of them had to be made a regimental sergeant major, distributed in hundreds to famous towns and villages, provided with weapons and military supplies, if possible, etc. The hetman retained the Chigirinsky regiment, the Pereyaslavsky gave it to Loboda, the Cherkasy to Voronchenka, the Kanevsky to Kutaka, and appointed Nechay to the rest , Giryu, Moroz, Ostap, Burlaya and others.
Along with the internal structure of Ukraine and the Cossacks, Bogdan at this time was diligently involved in foreign relations. His successful fight against Poland attracted general attention to him, and ambassadors from almost all neighboring powers and rulers gathered at his Chigirin residence with congratulations, gifts and various secret proposals, some of friendship, some of an alliance against the Poles. There were ambassadors from the Crimean Khan, then from the rulers of Moldavia and Wallachia, from the Prince of Semigrad Yuri Rakocha (former contender for the Polish throne) and finally from Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Khmelnitsky quite skillfully dodged among their various interests and proposals and composed letters in response to them.
Negotiations between Khmelnitsky and the Poles
Jan Casimir, as far as his power and means allowed him, began to prepare an army to suppress the Ukrainian uprising. Contrary to the wishes of the majority of the gentry, he did not confirm Vishnevetsky in the hetman's dignity, because some of the senators, led by Chancellor Ossolinsky, continued to act against him; and the new king himself did not favor him, as a former opponent of his candidacy; Khmelnitsky’s insistent demands that Vishnevetsky not be given the hetman’s paper probably did not go unnoticed. While waiting for Potocki and Kalinowski to be freed from Tatar captivity, Jan Casimir took control of military affairs into his own hands. Meanwhile, in January of 1649, the promised commission was sent to Khmelnitsky for negotiations, headed by the famous Adam Kisel again. When the commission with its retinue crossed near Zvyagl (Novgorod-Volynsky) across the Sluch River and entered the Kyiv Voivodeship, i.e. Ukraine, it was met by one Cossack colonel (Donets), appointed to accompany it; but on the way to Perelagav the population received her with hostility and refused to deliver her food; the people did not want any negotiations with the Poles and considered all relations with them finished. In Pereyaslav, although the hetman himself, together with the foreman, met the commission, with military music and cannon fire (February 9), however, Kisel was immediately convinced that this was no longer the old Khmelnytsky with his assurances of devotion to the king and Rech. Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; Now the tone of Bogdan and those around him was much higher and more decisive. Already at the ceremony of presenting him with the hetman's insignia, namely the mace and banner, on behalf of the king, one drunken colonel interrupted Kisel's rhetorical speech and scolded the lords. Bogdan himself reacted to these signs with obvious indifference. The subsequent negotiations and meetings did not lead to concessions on his part, despite all the mellifluous speeches and convictions of Kisel. Khmelnitsky, as usual, often got drunk, and then treated the commissars rudely, demanded the extradition of his enemy Chaplinsky and threatened the Poles with all sorts of disasters; threatened to exterminate the duks and princes and make the king “free” so that he could equally chop off the heads of the guilty princes and Cossacks; and sometimes called himself the “single ruler” and even the “autocrat” of Russia; He said that before he fought for his own grievance, but now he will fight for the Orthodox faith. The colonels boasted of Cossack victories, directly mocked the Poles and said that they were no longer the same, not the Zholkiewskis, Chodkiewiczs and Konetspolskis, but the Tkhorzhevskies (cowards) and Zayonchkovskies (hares). It was also in vain that the commissars strove for the release of captured Poles, especially those taken in Kodak, Konstantinov and Bar.
Finally, the commission barely achieved agreement to conclude a truce before Trinity Day and left, taking with it some preliminary conditions for peace proposed by the hetman, namely: that in Kiev or Ukraine the very name of the union should not exist, also that there should be no Jesuits and railways, so that the Kiev metropolitan sits in the Senate, and the governor and castellan are Orthodox, so that the Cossack hetman is directly subordinate to the king, so that Vishnevetsky is not the crown hetman, etc. Khmelnitsky postponed the determination of the Cossack register and other conditions of peace until the spring, until the general meeting colonels and all senior officers and up to the future commission that will arrive at the Rossava River. The main reason for his intransigence, apparently, was not so much the presence of foreign ambassadors in Pereyaslav at that time and the hope for help from neighbors, but rather the displeasure of the people or, in fact, the mob, who clearly grumbled about these negotiations and scolded the hetman, fearing that he would not gave into serfdom to the Polish lords. Khmelnitsky sometimes expressed to the commissars that from this side his very life was in danger and that without the consent of the military council he could not do anything. No matter how unsuccessful it was this time, the embassy of Hell. Kisel with the Commission and no matter how many nobles condemned this Orthodox Rusyn, accusing him of almost treason against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and secret agreements with his fellow tribesman and co-religionist Khmelnitsky (whom some intelligent Poles called the “Zaporozhye Machiavell”); however, the king appreciated the works of the elderly and already overcome by illnesses governor of Bratslav aimed at pacification; at that time, the Kiev voivode Janusz Tyshkevich died, and Jan Casimir gave the Kiev voivodeship to Kisel, thereby raising him to senatorial rank, to the even greater displeasure of his comrades, the Rada lords Kunakov, Grabianka, Samovidets, Velichko, Twardowski, Kokhovsky, Canon Yuzefovich, Erlich, Albrecht Radziwal, Mashkevich:, “Monuments” Kyiv. Commissions, Acts of the South. and Zap. Russia, Acts of Moscow. States, Supplementum ad Hist. Ruњ. monumenta, Archive South-West. Russia, etc.
Monuments I. Dept. 3. Adam Kisel, in a letter to Primate-Archbishop Lubensky dated May 31, 1648, mentions his advice not to divide the Polish army and not to go to Zaporozhye (No. 7). Letter from the Lvov Syndic about the Zheltovodsk and Korsun defeats. Here it is reported that Khmelnitsky, who stood near the White Church, “already calls himself the Prince of Russia” (No. 10). Polish interrogation of one of Khmelnitsky’s agents sent throughout Ukraine, namely Yarema Kontsevich. To hide their Cossack rank, agents “wear their hair down.” The clergy helps the uprising; for example, the Lutsk ruler Athanasius sent Krivonos 70 hooks, 8 half-barrels of gunpowder, 7,000 in money to attack Olyka and Dubno. Orthodox priests send messages to each other from city to city. Orthodox townsfolk in the cities conspire among themselves on how to help the Cossacks; they promise to set fire to the city when they attack, others to pour sand into cannons, etc. (No. 11). Letter dated June 12 from Khmelnitsky to Vladislav IV, then already deceased. Calculation of Cossack complaints filed at the Warsaw Sejm on July 17, signed by Khmelnytsky. Responses to these complaints. (Nos. 24, 25 et seq.). Letter from Krivonos dated July 25 to Prince Dominik Zaslavsky, with a complaint about the atrocities of Jeremiah Vishnevetsky, who cut off the heads and impaled small people, and drilled out the eyes of priests" (No. 30). Letter from Kisel to Chancellor Ossolinsky, dated August 9, about his ruin the estates of Gushchi by the Cossacks; and “the railways were all cut out, the courtyards and taverns were burned" (No. 35). Letter from the Podolsk judge Myaskovsky, dated the same 9th, about the capture of Bar by storm from the Cossacks. “The most harmful were the Moscow walk-towns, behind which the traitors ordered the villagers to go" (No. 36). According to Kisel, Krivonos, for his cruelty, on the orders of Khmelnitsky, was put on a chain and chained to a cannon, but then released on bail. Khmelnitsky allegedly had 180,000 Cossacks and 30,000 Tatars in August (No. 38 and 40). About the actions near Konstantinov and Ostrog (Nos. 35, 41, 45, 46, 47, 49). Under Konstantinov, the “brave” Pan Chaplinsky (No. 51) is mentioned among the commanders in the detachment of Alexander Konetspolsky (No. 51). This refutes the legend Wieliczka that after the Yellow Waters, Khmelnitsky sent a detachment to Chigirin to capture his enemy, whom he executed. However, Bogdan himself refutes this legend, repeatedly demanding that the Poles hand over Chaplinsky to him. About the negotiations of the Kisel commission with the Cossacks in Pereyaslav, notes from one of the commissioners, Myaskovsky (Nos. 57, 60, and 61). For the conditions handed down by Kisel, see also Kunakov, 288 – 289, Kakhovsky, 109, and Supplem. ad. Hist. mon. 189. Novitsky "Adam Kisel, Voivode of Kiev". ("Kyiv. Antiquity". 1885. November). The author, by the way, from Ksiкga Michalowskiego cites Latin libel poems about the unloved by the Poles, Hell. Kisel and even his mother. For example: Adde quod matrem olim meretricem Nunc habeat monacham sed incantatricem.
Acts of South.u West. Russia.III. From March 17 Hell. Kisel notifies the Putivl governor about the flight to Zaporozhye of one 1000 or a little more Cherkasy Cossacks; “and their elders have a simple clap, called Khmelnitsky,” who is thinking of fleeing to the Don and, together with the Donets, launching a sea raid on Turkish land. (It is possible that such a rumor was initially spread not without the participation of Bogdan himself). And on April 24, the same Kisel, in a letter to the Moscow boyars, informs them that the Polish army went “through the field and the Dnieper” against the traitor Khmelnitsky and expresses hope for his speedy execution if he does not flee to the Crimea; and in case the Horde arrives, he reminds that, according to the recently concluded agreement, Moscow troops must come to the aid of the Poles (Nos. 163 and 177). Details about the election and coronation of Jan Casimir (No. 243. Zap. Kunakov).
Acts of Moscow. State Vol. II. News of 1648 - 1649: about the capture of Kodak, about the Zheltovodsk and Korsun battles, about the transition of the leistrov to Khmelnitsky; strange rumors about the king, such as that he fled to Smolensk, or that he was at one with the Cossacks, although the people stood up for the Orthodox faith. Poles and railways are fleeing across the Dnieper, i.e. from left to right, they are sometimes exterminated en masse when a city is captured. Residents of the left bank pray to God to be under the royal high hand. Obviously, from the very beginning of this war of extermination, the left side is drawn to Moscow (Nos. 338, 341 - 350). News of 1650–1653: reports from the Belgorod governor about the pestilence in the Cherkassy cities; about the campaigns of Timofey Khmelnitsky in Moldova, about the Treaty of Belotserkov, about the fact that the right side is drawn to Poland, about the complaints of residents against Bogdan for his alliance with the Tatars, who devastated the land, about the alliance of the Don Cossacks with the Kalmyks against the Tatars, about the Nezhin colonels Iv. Zolotarenka and Poltava Pushkar, about Turkish intervention, etc. (Nos. 468, 470, 485, 488, 492 – 497, etc.) Supplemtntum ad Hist.Rus. monumentu. Generalist from Warsaw lords about the royal election and the war with the Cossacks; and it is said that Rus', i.e. Cossacks, no longer lightly armed with bows and arrows, but now they are fighting with fire (177). Further, Khmelnitsky’s letters to Kisel, Zaslavsky, to the senator from near Lvov, to Weyer, the commandant of Zamosc, the king’s letter to Khmelnitsky near Zamosc, etc. Archive South-West. Russia, Part II. vol. I. Nos. XXIX - XXXI, Instructions to the Volyn ambassadors to the Sejm in March 1649.
According to Kunakov’s reports, not just one Cossack-Tatar invasion, but also rumors about Moscow’s preparations to take away Smolensk and other cities prompted the Poles to rush to choose a king and order the fortification of Smolensk (Ak. South and West Russia. III. pp. 306 - 307).
Regarding the mission of Jacob Smiarowski and the retreat from Zamosc, see the article by Alexander Krausgar, based on handwritten sources, published in a Polish collection in 1894 and reported in Russian translation in the December issue. Kyiv antiquity for 1894. Canon Yuzefovich and Grabianka speak about the ceremonial greetings for Khmelnitsky upon his return from Zamosc. The Tatars report the capture of artisans who bared their heads in Polish. It is confirmed by the following fact: the aforementioned old man Gr. Klimov near Kiev was captured by the Tatars; but when the Cossacks “saw that he had no food, they took him from the Tatars to themselves.” (Acts of South and West Russia. III. No. 205). Grabyanka, Samovidets and Tvardovsky speak about Bogdan’s marriage to his godfather Chaplinskaya (“with the permission of the Tsaregrad Patriarch”). Incredible details about that in the diary of Kisel's commissars (Monuments. I. dept. 3. pp. 335 – 339): as if the fugitive Patriarch of Jerusalem, on his way to Moscow, married Khmelnitsky in absentia in Kyiv, since Chaplinskaya was then in Chigirin. He sent her gifts with the monk; but Khmelnitsky’s son Timoshka, “a real robber,” gave him vodka to drink and shaved his beard, and Khmelnitsky’s wife gave him only 50 thalers. The Patriarch allegedly gave Bogdan the title of “most serene prince” and blessed him to “ultimately exterminate the Lyakhs.” Kokhovsky mentions the same patriarch and Bogdan’s marriage (111). Kunakov speaks of the Patriarch of Jerusalem Paisius, who, while in Kyiv, blessed Khmelnitsky to establish the Greek faith in Rus', to cleanse it of union; that is why Kisel’s commission was not successful (the above-mentioned hostile attitude towards Paisius is therefore understandable). To this Patriarch Paisius, Khmelnitsky sent with the Ukrainian elders a secret order, composed by the clerk Iv. Vygovsky (Acts of Southern and Western Russia. III. Nos. 243 and 244). In Kulakov’s article list about his embassy in Warsaw, among other things, the main persons of the lords’ council of that time are given; and his reports about Maria Ludwiga’s negotiations with Jan Casimir regarding marrying him are also interesting. (No. 242).
For Pilyavitsy, see Monuments (Nos. 53 and 54), Kunakov, as well as Polish writers Kokhovsky, Mashkevich and Twardowski. The famous impostor Jan Faustin Luba apparently fell near Pilyavitsy, if you believe the contradictory news from Kunakov. (Pages 283, 301 and 303). Kokhovsky reports that after Pilyavitsy, Khmelnitsky assumed the power and strength of the sovereign duke (vim ducis et aucloritatem complexus), only without his title. He distributed positions to those around him, such as: Charnota, Krivonos, Kalina, Evstachy, Voronchenko, Loboda, Burlai; but the most influential under him became John Vygovsky, the head of the clerkship. This Vygovsky, a nobleman of the Greek religion, previously served in the Kiev court, was sentenced to death for forgery in acts, but through the intercession of noble people he avoided it, and then entered the army (81). Kokhovsky quotes the cry: “Well done for the faith, for the faith !" (And on page 36 Pototsky’s words to Kalinovsky: praesente parocho cesserit jurisdictio vicarii). Kokhovsky was used by the Lvov canon Yuzefovich, as he himself admitted when he had to describe in more detail the siege of Lvov by Khmelnitsky and look for other sources (151). Here, among other things, he talks about miraculous visions in Catholic churches and monasteries, foreshadowing salvation from enemies. Woyna Domowa by Samoil Twardowski, written in Polish verse and published in 1681, in an old Little Russian translation by Steph. Savetsky, clerk of the Lubensky regiment, is placed in volume IV of the Wieliczka Chronicle, under the title “The Tale of the Cossack War with the Poles.” There are some details here. For example, about the capture of Tulchin by Colonel Ganzha, then Ostap, about the murder of Prince Chetvertinsky with his own butcher and the capture of his wife by the colonel (12 - 13). This fact is somewhat different in Kokhovsky (48): Czetwertinius Borovicae in oppido interceptus; violata in conspectu uxore ac enectis liberis, demum ipse a molitore proprio ferrata pil№ medius proeceditur. (The same in more detail in Yuzefovich. 129). Kokhovsky mentions the capture of Kodak (57), mistakenly calling him the commandant of the Frenchman Marion, who was at its first capture by Sulima in 1635. Khmelnytsky sent Nizhyn Colonel Shumeiko to Kodak, who forced Commandant Grodzitsky to surrender at the end of 1648 (Mashkevich’s Diary. “Memoirs.” Issue 2. p. 110. Note). About Kodatsky Castle, its garrison of 600 people and the Dnieper rapids, numbering 12, see Mashkevich on pp. 412 - 413 of the translation. According to Mashkevich, the army of Hetman Radivil marched along the Dnieper to Loev in 1649 on canoes, setting up walk-towns on them (438). Ibid in note. on page 416 there is a link to Geisman's "Battle of the Yellow Waters". Saratov. 1890. He points out the yellow can against Saksagan, and considers the village of Zholte on the northwestern outskirts of the Verkhnedneprovsky district to be the site of the battle.
We find some, not always reliable, news about these events in Erlich. For example, regarding the sudden death of Vladislav IV, there was a rumor that while hunting, his guide, shooting at a running deer, hit the king who was chasing him. The registered Cossacks, who betrayed the Poles, “taking off their hats at once,” rushed at them. The Cossack commissar Shemberg, captured at Zheltye Vody, was beheaded by the Cossacks. He also reports on Nikolai Pototsky’s addiction to drinks and young gentlemen, on the mass flight of the gentry with their wives and children from their estates to Volyn and Poland after the Korsun defeat, when serfs rebelled everywhere and began to exterminate the railways and gentry, plunder their yards , rape their wives and daughters (61 – 68). According to Erlich and Radziwill, 200,000 zlotys were taken from Lviv, according to Yuzefovich - 700,000 Polish florins, according to Kokhovsky - 100,000 imperialium. Likewise, regarding the number of troops, especially Cossack and Tatar, there is great disagreement and frequent exaggeration in the sources.
Yerlich, an Orthodox, but half-policed nobleman and landowner, treats Khmelnitsky and the rebel Cossacks with hatred. In the same vein, there is various news from Albert Radziwiel in his Pamietnikax (vol. II.). From them, by the way, we learn that the Polish ambassadors Kisel and Patz, who returned from Moscow, gave a report on their embassy in the Senate with great ridicule of the Muscovites. He reports on the betrayal of the Russian people when the Cossacks captured the cities of Polonnoye, Zaslav, Ostrog, Korets, Mendzhizhech, Tulchin, on the beating of the gentry, townspeople and especially the railways; His Olyka also fell into the hands of the Cossacks through the betrayal of his subjects. He lists their outrages, cruelties and sacrilege against Catholic churches and shrines; and cites the prophecy of one dying boy: quadragesimus octavus mirabilis annus. About the strong influx of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and townspeople into the army and new registered regiments, in Samovidets (19 - 20). Kokhovsky names the XVII Cossack legions, but lists 15, and when mentioning the names of the colonels, he has some disagreement (115 pages). Grabyanka lists 14 regiments with colonels after Zborov. (94). The “Register of the Zaporozhye Army,” also compiled after the Treaty of Zborov, lists 16 regiments (“Cht. Ob. i. et al.” 1874. Book 2). In the Acts of Southern and Western Russia. (Vol. VIII, No. 33) also after Zborov, “the hetman created sixteen regiments,” and here they are listed (on page 351) with the names of the colonels; Ivan Bogun commands two regiments, Kalnitsky and Chernigov.
About Smyarovsky's embassy and his murder at Erlich (98). Monuments.I. III. Page 404 and 429. Ksiega Mikhailovsky. Nos. 114 and 115. Handwritten Collection from the library of gr. Khreptovich (239), where the correspondence of the crown hetmans and the king with Khmelnytsky. Ibid. Russian song in Latin letters about Bohdan Khmelnitsky, under 1654 (277). Siege of Zbarazh: Kokhovsky, Tvardovsky, Yuzefovich, Samovidets and Grabyanka. Tvardovsky and Grabyanka talk about the nobleman who made his way to the king, but they differ in details. Grabyanka calls him Skretuski (72). By Tvardovsky and Kokhovsky, Khmelnitsky used during this siege, according to Moscow custom, a walk-city to attack the ramparts, but unsuccessfully; Mines and countermines are mentioned. Yuzefovich counts only 12,000 Poles near Zbarazh, and 300,000 Cossacks and Tatars! Correspondence of the king, khan and Khmelnitsky near Zborov in Monuments. I. 3. Nos. 81 – 85.
Treaty of Zborov in S.G.G. and D. III. No. 137. (Here the Polish text and Russian translation are not always accurate). Some news about Zbarazh and Zborov in Acts of Southern and Western Russia. T. III. Nos. 272 - 279, especially No. 301 (Kunakov’s report about the siege, battle and treaty, the meeting of the king with the khan and Khmelnitsky, who allegedly treated the king proudly and dryly during this meeting, then about the indignation of the slaves against Khmelnitsky for the treaty, on the basis of which Kunakov prophesies a resumption of the war) and 303 (a letter from the Putivl governors about the same events and the Zborov articles). T. X. No. 6 (also about these articles). Archive of Southwestern Russia. C.P.T.I. No. XXXII. (On the return of Orthodox churches and spiritual estates on the basis of the Zboriv Treaty).
In details about the defeat at Berestechko, the flight of the khan and Khmelnitsky, sources differ a lot. Some Polish authors say that the khan detained Bogdan as a prisoner. (See Butcinski. 95). The note from clerk Grigory Bogdanov repeats the same thing. (Acts of Southern and Western Russia, III. No. 328. p. 446). But Ukrainian chroniclers, for example, Samovidets and Grabyanka, do not say anything like that. Also, Colonel Semyon Savich, the hetman’s envoy in Moscow, says nothing about the forcible detention of Khmelnitsky (Acts Yu. and 3. R. III. No. 329). It is more reliable that Khmelnitsky himself did not want to return to his regiments without the Tatars. And the khan, judging partly from the same sources, explained his flight simply by panic. But Mr. Butsinsky points out the news of one Ukrainian writer, according to which the khan fled, seeing treason against him on the part of the Cossacks and Khmelnitsky, and on this sole basis he believes that the khan’s suspicion was not groundlessly(93–94. With reference to the “Brief Historical Description of Little Russia”). The modern plan of the battle of Berestechko, preserved in the portfolio of King Stanislav August, is attached to the first volume of Bantysh-Kamensky.
Belotserkovsky Treaty, Batog, Suceava, Zhvanets and subsequent ones: Grabyanka, Samovidets, Velichko, Yuzefovich, Kokhovsky. S.G.G. and D.III. No. 143. Monuments. III. Dept. 3. No. 1 (letter from Kisel to the king dated February 24, 1652 about the Belotserkovsky Treaty, with advice to deal with Khmelnitsky as gently as possible in order to quarrel him with the Tatars), 3 (letter from Stockholm from the former sub-chancellor Radzeevsky to Khmelnitsky on May 30 of the same year ; and he praises Queen Christina, who can fight the Poles, and therefore it would be good to conclude an alliance with her. This letter was intercepted by the Poles); 4 (about the defeat of the Poles at Batog), 5 (letter from Polish Hetman Stanislav Potocki to Khmelnytsky in August 1652, with advice to rely on the mercy of the king). Regarding Timosh’s marriage to Roksanda, see Vengrzhenevsky’s article “The Wedding of Timofey Khmelnitsky.” (Kyiv Antiquity. 1887. May). Bogdan’s acquisitiveness is also evidenced by a document printed in Kyiv. Star.(1901 No. I. under the title “B. Khmelnitsky’s Apiary”); it shows that Bogdan took away an apiary from a certain Shungan, which was located in the Black Forest, which was 15 versts from Chigirin (Alexander, district, Kherson, province). Bogdan’s second wife, the former Chaplinskaya, “a Polish by birth,” according to the chroniclers (Grabyanka, Tvardovsky), knew how to please him: dressed in a luxurious dress, she brought a burner to the guests in golden goblets, and for her husband she ground tobacco in a handle, and herself together with I got drunk on it. According to Polish rumors, the former Chaplinskaya entered into a relationship with a watchmaker from Lvov, and as if they jointly stole one of the barrels of gold that he had buried from Bogdan, for which he ordered them both to be hanged. And according to Velichka, this was done in the absence of his father Timofey, who ordered his stepmother to be hanged on the gate. By all indications, this news is of a legendary nature; which is what Vengrzhenevsky points out in the above-mentioned article. In this regard, the message from the Greek Elder Paul to Moscow to Moscow is interesting: “On the 10th day (1651), the Mayans came to the hetman with the news that his wife had passed away, and the hetman was very upset about this.” (Acts of Southern and Western Russia, III. No. 319. Pp. 452 ). Velichko speaks about Khmelnitsky’s attack on part of the Horde and its pogrom near Mezhyhirya. I. 166.
Tvardovsky (82) and Grabyanka (95) speak about Khmelnytsky’s citizenship of Turkey. See Kostomarov "Bogdan Khmelnytsky tributary of the Ottoman Porte". (Bulletin of Europe 1878. XII). Around 1878, the author found Min. in the Moscow Archives. In. Cases, namely in the Polish Crown Metrics, are several acts of 1650–1655, confirming the Khmelnitsky’s allegiance to the Turkish Sultan, what are the Turkish charter of Sultan Makhmet and the Greek charters with a Latin translation, written by the Khmelnitsky to the Crimean Khan. From this correspondence it is clear that Bogdan, even after taking the oath of Moscow citizenship, continues to be cunning and explains to the Sultan and Khan his relationship with Moscow simply by contractual terms for receiving assistance against the Poles. G. Butsinsky in his above-mentioned monograph (pp. 84 et seq.) also asserts the Turkish citizenship of Bogdan and is based on the same documents from the Archive of the Ministry. In. Del. He brings letters to Bogdan from some Turkish and Tatar nobles and a letter to him from the Constantinople Patriarch Parthenius; this patriarch, who received and blessed the ambassadors of Khmelnitsky who arrived to the Sultan, died as a victim of slander by the rulers of Moldova and Voloshsky. On this occasion, Mr. Butsinsky refers to the “History of Relations between Russia and the East” by priest. Nikolsky. At the same time, he refers Cromwell’s letter to Bogdan. (With reference to Kyiv. Antiquity 1882 Book. 1.page 212). Documents on Turkish citizenship were later partially published in the Acts of Southern and Western Russia. See T. XIV. No. 41. (Letter from the Janissary Pasha to Khmelnitsky at the end of 1653).
On January 6, 1596, the legendary hetman of the Zaporozhian Army, commander and statesman, leader of the uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Zinovy Bohdan Khmelnytsky was born.
Little is known about Khmelnitsky's life. The father of the future hetman, an Orthodox nobleman, named his son with a double name in the European manner. Being a wealthy man, Mikhail Khmelnitsky decided to give his heir a good education, so Bogdan studied at one of the Kyiv schools, and then at the Jesuit college in Lviv. Returning home, Khmelnitsky joined his father's cavalry hundred, thus becoming a registered Cossack in the service of the Polish king. At first, Bogdan was devoted to the Polish crown, even fought with his father in the Polish-Turkish War. In one of the battles he lost his father, and he himself was captured, where he spent two long years.
Returning to his native Subotov farm, Bogdan tried to settle down, but the hot blood of the hereditary military man took over. Already in adulthood, in 1637, he became a military clerk of the Zaporozhye Sich. And soon after this, the Polish king granted Khmelnitsky the rank of centurion for his loyalty. In the forties, France became seriously interested in the Cossack infantry, which required very little money, but showed excellent results in battle.
On the recommendation of the Polish ambassador, Cardinal Mazarin invited Bogdan Khmelnitsky to fight under French banners. By the way, in some battles he fought shoulder to shoulder with Charles Castelmore, who served as the prototype for d’Artagnan by Alexandre Dumas. He would have continued to participate in endless battles if not for the events at home. Bogdan's long-time sworn enemy, the nobleman Chaplinsky, decided to take possession of the Subotov farm, in which the Khmelnitsky family estate was located. Chaplinsky carried out a pogrom, burned down several houses, beat his young son to death and kidnapped his wife Anna. She, unable to bear the shame and bullying she suffered, died. Khmelnitsky, in despair, turned to the Polish king Vladislav for protection. But the king just shrugged his shoulders and was surprised that the Cossacks, having sabers, could not defend justice themselves. The centurion remembered these words and, with a detachment of Cossacks, attacked and destroyed Chaplinsky’s estate. For this they tried to imprison Bogdan, but he managed to escape to the Zaporozhye Sich.
It is then that he becomes the sworn enemy of all Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the same year, he created a partisan detachment of Cossacks, calling for an armed struggle against the “gentry’s autocracy.” The Cossacks choose Khmelnitsky as their hetman, and he feels the strength to stand at the head of the popular uprising. Thus began the struggle of Ukrainian Cossacks and peasants against Poland. Personal grudge Bohdan Khmelnytsky broke out into a serious war, the result of which was the separation of Ukraine from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and reunification with the Muscovite kingdom.
Somehow, the Zaporozhye hetman knew how to fight. He creates a real army from scattered detachments, turns to the Crimean Khan for help, who, although he cannot openly oppose Poland, gives Khmelnitsky four thousand horsemen. By April 1648, the hetman was gathering an army of ten thousand, with which military operations could begin.
Throughout the War of Liberation, Hetman Khmelnytsky conducted active negotiations with Moscow on the reunification of Russia and Ukraine. He understood that only this could protect Ukraine from attempts by the Polish crown to regain the country. In addition, Orthodox Russians were closer to Ukrainians than Catholic Poles. Due to repeated requests from Khmelnitsky, the Zemsky Sobor, meeting on October 1, 1653 in Moscow, decided to accept Ukraine into Russia and declare war on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. And the Ukrainians were not at all against it, and in 1654 the Great Rada unanimously spoke out in favor of reunification with Russia. Ukraine was granted a royal charter, which made the country an autonomous region of Russia with the right to elect a hetman.
After the defeat in the Russo-Polish War of 1654–1657, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth recognized the annexation of Left Bank Ukraine with the city of Kiev to the Russian Empire. Khmelnytsky ruled the Hetmanate for another three years. He died in July 1657 and was buried in Chigirin, the hetman's headquarters.
"Evening Moscow" invites you to remember the most significant battles of Bohdan Khmelnytsky.
1. Battle of Yellow Waters
The first serious battle of Bogdan Khmelnitsky's army. The commander of the Polish army, Stefan Potocki, decided to nip the Cossack rebellion in the bud. On April 21, 1648, Pototsky, at the head of a punitive detachment, went to the steppe. They were supported by dragoons and registered Cossacks, who were in the service of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, who set off along the Dnieper in kayaks. The Poles easily repulsed small attacks, but the clashes became more and more frequent and the Poles had to set up camp.
Ukrainian Cossacks tried to take the Polish camp, but the enemy’s more advanced artillery prevented them from doing so. Khmelnitsky found himself in a difficult situation - on the one hand, if the Poles penetrated deep into the country, the uprising would have failed. But on the other hand, the army was not prepared for a long siege. Then the hetman found a way out of the situation - since registered Cossacks fought for Poland, Khmelnytsky quickly found a common language with them and they soon went over to the side of the rebels. The Cossack-Tatar army quickly increased, and the Polish army melted away at the same speed. On May 16, Khmelnitsky agreed with Potocki that the Poles would hand over all the artillery and gunpowder to the Cossacks, and in return they would allow the Poles to retreat.
But the Cossacks wanted a real war. Bogdan Khmelnitsky had to fight. He used artillery against the mobile camp of the Poles, and it was all over in just half a day. Almost three thousand Poles became Tatar prisoners. Stefan Potocki was seriously wounded in the shoulder and died of gangrene four days later. The first victory gave the Ukrainian people hope for liberation, and Khmelnitsky for the first time used a detachment formed from the Tatar cavalry, which covered the main forces of the Cossack army, and defeated the enemy in parts.
2. Battle of Pilyavtsi
Took place on September 13, 1648. The Cossack-Tatar army numbered about 70 thousand people. Khmelnytsky built a fortified camp near Pilyavtsy, and under the small castle of Pilyavka the armies clashed in battle. The battle ended with the complete defeat of the Poles. The scattered remnants of the Polish army, abandoning all artillery and convoys, fled in the direction of Lvov. True, they did not stay there for long, collecting as many valuables as possible and rushing further to Zamosc. Khmelnitsky and his army slowly followed towards Poland, terrifying the Polish king.
3. Battle of Zborov
Happened on August 5-6, 1649 near the city of Zborov, in the Ternopil region. This was the first proper siege of Khmelnitsky's army. After a month and a half siege of Zboriv, the Poles began to starve. The city almost fell, but Khmelnitsky received a message that the king with the main army was moving to help the Poles. A battle ensued, and it seemed that the victory of the Cossacks was inevitable, but in the midst of the battle the Tatars demanded negotiations on a truce. Khmelnitsky had to obey. On August 7, 1649, a truce was signed, and then a meeting between Khmelnytsky and King John Casimir took place at the latter’s headquarters. Bogdan held himself proudly and conveyed to the king his demands for an end to oppression and discrimination of the Ukrainian people.
4. Defeat of the Poles near Batog
It took place under Mount Batog on May 23, 1652. The "thin peace" between the Cossacks and Poles was broken. The Polish army was completely defeated, most of the soldiers were killed. And the battle itself only strengthened the Ukrainian spirit and sowed panic among the Poles. Individual garrisons abandoned cities and regions, deserted or fled to the west. The entire population of Ukraine had already rebelled, and simply destroying the leaders of the uprising was not enough. In Warsaw, it was decided to create a special army to fight the Cossacks, and until that time to lull Khmelnitsky’s vigilance. A letter was sent to the hetman, in which it was proposed to forget previous grievances if he broke off friendly relations with Crimea and Moscow.
5. Battle of Zhvanets
The last major battle of Khmelnitsky, after which the Russian-Polish War began. The siege of the city of Zhvanets lasted from September to December 1653. All this time, the Poles suffered from hunger and lack of warm clothing, but Khmelnitsky’s army was also unreliable - the Crimean Tatars were constantly trying to leave. Therefore, the hetman decided to abandon the general battle, trying instead to bring the enemy to capitulation. This would have been possible if the Crimean Khan had not realized that Russia would soon enter the war, and this meant the inevitable reconciliation of Crimea and Poland in the face of a stronger enemy. The king had to pay the khan a huge indemnity and allow the population of Volyn to be robbed and taken captive. After this agreement, the Tatars simply left Khmelnitsky’s army. The Cossacks had to retreat.
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Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The population was subjected to double oppression: feudal and national-religious.
Note 1
In $1596$ it was adopted Union of Brest, which led to the creation of the Russian Uniate Church. Those who entered the union united with the Catholic Church, maintaining rituals according to the Greek Orthodox model.
Polish magnates forcibly annexed vast lands, becoming owners of huge latifundia. Also, Russian nobles who converted to Catholicism and were loyal to the Polish-Lithuanian authorities became large landowners: the Vishnevetskys, Ostrozhskys, etc. At the same time, the growth of extortions and various abuses from townspeople and peasants increased.
The Cossacks were also not happy with their situation. For protecting borders and repelling threats, they were included in a special list - registry. According to the register, a reward was due. However, the number of Cossacks in the Zaporozhye Sich was constantly growing, but the register did not change. This led to riots at the beginning of the 17th century among ordinary Cossacks against the pro-Polish hetmans.
Finished works on a similar topic
The immediate cause that led to the Khmelnitsky uprising was yet another Polish lawlessness. Daniil Chaplinsky, the Polish captain and sub-elder of the city of Chigirin took away the estate, kidnapped his beloved and pinned to death the son of Bogdan Khmelnitsky, a registered Cossack.
Move
Bohdan Khmelnytsky was born in $1596 and was of fairly noble origin. He received a good European education, but did not convert to Catholicism. He took part in the Polish-Turkish war and was captured. Bohdan Khmelnytsky was on good terms with the king Vladislav IV.
The elder who hated Khmelnytsky Daniil Chaplinsky attacked his farm Subotov, kidnapped his beloved Helena and married her. The ten-year-old son was severely beaten and died. Khmelnitsky's appeal to the authorities and even the king personally did not help; on the contrary, he was sent to prison on charges of rebellion.
Having failed to achieve retribution according to the law, Khmelnitsky decided to act independently. In February $1648 a group of Cossacks on the island Tomakovka decided to go to the Sich, where she defeated the Polish garrison.
Negotiations were held with the Crimean Khan, as a result of which the Khan did not declare war on Poland, but provided a detachment.
Bohdan Khmelnytsky was elected hetman of the Zaporozhye Army.
In May $1648, the Cossacks defeated the army of Crown Hetman Potocki in the battle of Zhelty Vody and at Korsun. The victory ensured an influx of participants, the war became a liberation war. For $1648$ the Poles were expelled from Left Bank Ukraine, as well as Kyiv, Podolsk and Bratslav voivodeships.
$5$ August $1649$ Khmelnitsky defeated the king at Zborov. Was concluded Treaty of Zborov: autonomy was formed - Hetmanate with the capital in Chigirin, with a single ruler in the person of the elected hetman and the supreme body - the All-Cossack Rada; the register was brought to $40$ thousand.
At the same time, uprisings were taking place in Belarus, but much weaker. Khmelnitsky sent Cossacks to help.
Since the beginning of the uprising, Khmelnitsky repeatedly asked the Russian Tsar to accept the citizenship of the Cossacks, but he avoided answering.
In June $1651, the Crimean Tatars betrayed the Cossacks in the battle of Berestechko, as a result they were defeated. By Belotserkov Treaty The registry has been greatly reduced.
Finally, in the fall of $1653, the Zemsky Sobor approved the admission of Ukraine to Russia. In winter $1654$ g.
Note 2
The war with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth began. In $1654, Smolensk was occupied, as well as $33 Belarusian cities (including Polotsk, Vitebsk, Mogilev).
Sweden took advantage of the moment and captured most of Poland, including Warsaw. Russia was not satisfied with the strengthening of Sweden, so a truce was concluded with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in $1656$. And Bogdan Khmelnitsky died in Chigirin from a stroke in $1657$.
Results
The war between Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth resumed in $1658 and lasted until the conclusion in January of $1667. Truce of Andrusovo. It recognized the inclusion of Left Bank Ukraine into Russia and the return of Smolensk. Then the eternal peace of $1686 was secured for Russia by Kyiv. These achievements were achieved thanks to the dedication of Bohdan Khmelnytsky.
The unbearable social, religious and national conditions in which the population of Ukraine-Rus found themselves during the period of “golden peace” (1638-48) created all the preconditions for an outbreak of popular anger and the beginning of the liberation struggle.
She didn't have to wait long. The immediate cause was the violence of representatives of the Polish administration against one registered Cossack - the Chigirin centurion Bogdan Khmelnitsky.
A Polish official, sub-elder Chigirinsky, Chaplinsky, in the absence of Bogdan Khmelnitsky, attacked his farm Subbotovo, robbed him, took away his wife (according to some sources, this was not the legal wife, but the cohabitant of the widower Khmelnitsky) and ordered his servants to flog his young son, after which the boy he died a few days later.
Such attacks were an everyday phenomenon during the “Golden Peace” and, as a rule, occurred with impunity for Catholic Poles. Chaplinsky's attack also went unpunished. All attempts by Khmelnitsky to restore his rights and punish the rapist not only ended in failure, but Khmelnitsky himself was put in prison by the Polish authorities.
Thanks to the intercession of influential friends from the foreman of the registered Cossacks, Khmelynitsky was released on bail, but he did not return to his duties as centurion Chigirinsky, but with several “like-minded people” he went “to the Bottom.” “Niz” was then called the center of the fugitives who disobeyed the Poles, Cossacks and Cossacks, located on Butsky Island, lower along the Dnieper than the official Zaporozhye Sich, which at that time was completely under Polish control.
Having reached “Niz”, Khmelnitsky announced that he was starting a fight “against the gentry’s autocracy” and, according to a contemporary, “everything that was alive” began to flock to him.
Biography of Khmelnitsky
Before moving on to the description of further events, it is necessary to say a few words about Bogdan Khmelnitsky himself, who led the uprising and directed the events.
There are many legends, thoughts and tales about Bogdan Khmelnytsky, but accurate biographical information about this outstanding son of Ukraine is very scarce.
What is known with certainty is that he comes from a small Ukrainian Orthodox gentry, since he had his own family coat of arms, which only the gentry had. His father, Mikhail Khmelnitsky, served with the wealthy Polish noble magnate Zholkiewski, and then with his son-in-law Danilovsky, with whose detachment he took part in the war between Poland and Turkey and died in the battle of Tsetsora in Moldova (in 1620). With him was his son Bogdan-Zinovy, who was captured and only two years later was ransomed by his mother from Turkish captivity.
For his time, Khmelnitsky received a good education. He studied at one of the Jesuit schools. Exactly which one is unknown. Most likely, in Lvov. This statement is based on data preserved in the archives that the Poles, during negotiations with Khmelnitsky, included in the embassy the Lvov Jesuit priest Mokrysky, who, as the chronicle says, at one time taught Khmelnitsky “poetics and rhetoric.” Rhetoric was taught in the 8th grade of the Jesuit colleges. Consequently, Khmelnitsky completed the full eight-year college course. Further education at the college was purely theological, and people who did not choose a spiritual career usually ended their education with “rhetoric,” i.e., 8th grade. For that time, this education was not small. Khmelnitsky spoke Tatar and Turkish, which he learned while in captivity in Constantinople. In addition, Polish and Latin, in which teaching was conducted at the college.
In Russian, that is, in the then “book language” (common to Russians and Ukrainians, with certain, however, dialectical deviations), Khmelnitsky spoke and wrote, as can be seen from his surviving letters.
What positions Khmelnitsky held in the Cossack army at the beginning of his career is unknown. It is also unknown whether he took part in the uprisings of the 20s and 30s, although legends attribute him to active participation in these uprisings.
For the first time we meet the name of Khmelnytsky among the four ambassadors to the king after the suppression of the uprising of 1638. It must be assumed that he occupied a prominent position (according to some information from a military clerk), since he ended up in the embassy to the king. Some time later, there is information about his appointment as centurion Chigirinsky. The fact that Khmelnitsky was appointed to this position by the Poles, and not chosen by the Cossacks, indicates that the Poles considered him loyal and casts doubt on the legend's claims about his active participation in previous uprisings. If this really took place, then the Poles, of course, would have known about it and would not have agreed to his appointment.
Khmelnitsky was married to the sister of Nizhyn Colonel Somka, Anna, and had several children. There is accurate information about three sons and two daughters. Of the sons, one died from being beaten by Chaplinsky, the second (eldest), Timofey, was killed in battle, and the third, Yuri, was proclaimed hetman after the death of Khmelnytsky.
By the time of the uprising, Khmelnitsky was a widower and, abducted by Chaplinsky, his wife (and according to some sources his cohabitant) was his second wife and the stepmother of his children from his first wife.
The immediate reason for Khmelnitsky's uprising was, as stated above, the violence committed against Khmelnitsky and remaining unpunished. But the reasons lay, of course, not in personal insult and violence against Khmelnytsky, but in the violence, insults and humiliations that Ukrina-Rus experienced as a result of social, religious and national oppression of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
The previous presentation describes what exactly these oppressions consisted of and how they were constantly intensifying, making life unbearable, and therefore there is no need to repeat them.
Motives for the uprising
There is hardly any need to analyze exactly what motives were predominant in the uprising: social, religious or national. Some historians emphasize the social motive, believing that all others are subordinate to it; others, on the contrary, put the national question at the forefront, while others, finally, consider the religious question to be the main reason for the uprising. In reality, it is most likely that all three causes acted simultaneously, being mutually related and difficult to separate from one another.
Social oppression was experienced by the entire population, except for the feudal-magnate Orthodox elite (such as Kisil, Prince Chetvertinsky), the highest hierarchs of the Orthodox Church and, in part, the Orthodox gentry and the elders of the registered Cossacks.
Everyone suffered from oppression and humiliation of religious people, not excluding Orthodox magnates. There is a known case when Prince Ostrozhsky, who victoriously commanded the Polish army in the war with Moscow, was forced to endure humiliation during the celebration of the victory only because he was Orthodox.
And finally, national inequality, which the Poles have always emphasized in every possible way, equally offended all non-Poles, from the serf to the magnate or Orthodox bishop.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s call to free himself from Polish violence found a warm response among the entire population of Ukraine-Rus.
Not all segments of the population understood this liberation in the same way: for the magnates and the gentry it ended in complete equality with the Poles-magnates and the gentry; for some of the registered Cossacks, elders and wealthy people, liberation ended in equalization with the gentry, with the preservation of social order in both the first and second cases; and only for the peasantry, the poor Cossacks and the petty bourgeoisie, the liquidation of the existing social system was inextricably linked with liberation.
Depending on this, in a certain part of the population of Ukraine-Rus, there were conciliatory, compromise sentiments, which more than once led to capitulation during previous uprisings.
Purpose of the uprising
What was the final goal of the uprising? Historians differ on this issue. The task was quite definite: to free myself. What next after liberation? Some believe that the ultimate goal of the uprising was the creation of a completely independent state; others believe that the goal of the leaders of the uprising was to create an autonomous unit within the borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, following the example of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; still others, finally, are of the opinion that the ultimate goal was the creation of an autonomous federal unit with its inclusion in the Moscow state.
The option of creating an independent state, which Grushevsky and his school adheres to, does not stand up to any criticism, because from Khmelnitsky’s handwritten letters preserved in the Moscow archives it is clear that already in the first months of the uprising, after the brilliant victories over the Poles, Khmelnitsky asked Moscow not only for help, but also consent to the reunification of Ukraine with Moscow. This request for reunification is repeated in the future, both in Khmelnitsky’s letters and in numerous documents of that time.
The second option: the creation of a Russian principality, following the example of Lithuania, without a break with Poland, undoubtedly had its supporters, but only among the upper strata of society - the ruling classes. The example of the unlimited freedom of the Polish gentry attracted not only magnates and gentry, but also some of the senior officers of the registered Cossacks, who dreamed of “nobilizing”, that is, receiving the rights of the gentry. Later, the desire of this group was realized in the so-called “Treaty of Gadiach” (1658), according to which unsuccessful attempts were made to create a “Russian Principality” within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
And finally, the third option - reunification with Moscow while maintaining broad autonomy or federation, which was realized as a result of the uprising, although not completely.
This last option is not only historically accurate, but it was also logically inevitable, taking into account both the foreign political situation and the mood of the masses. Having neighbors such as aggressive Turkey, which was then at the zenith of its power, and no less aggressive Poland - at that time one of the strongest states in Europe - Ukraine had no chance of withstanding a struggle with them alone, which would have been inevitable in the event of the creation of a separate state . Khmelnitsky, regardless of his personal sympathies, about which there are different opinions, of course, understood this very well. He also knew the gravitation of the broad masses towards the same faith and blood of Moscow. And naturally, he chose the path of reunification with Moscow.
The international situation at that time was extremely complex and turbulent: there was a revolution in England, in France there were internal turmoil, the so-called “Fronde”; Germany and central Europe were exhausted and weakened by the Thirty Years' War. Moscow, shortly before the start of the uprising, concluded an unfavorable “eternal peace” with Poland. It was difficult to count on a violation of this peace and Moscow’s entry into a new war, which would have been inevitable if Moscow had actively taken the side of the rebellious Polish colony - Ukraine.
And yet Khmelnitsky started the war: the people's patience was exhausted. Organizing the people who had arrived to him for a campaign against the “volost” (the populated part of Ukraine), Khmelnitsky sent an embassy to the Crimean Khan asking for help. The moment for the request was good. Crimea was dissatisfied with Poland, since it sloppyly paid the annual “gift” with which it bought off raids; and besides, due to the shortage and loss of livestock, the Tatars were very inclined to make up for their shortcomings by robbery during the war. Khan agreed to help Khmelnitsky and sent a detachment of 4,000 people under the command of Tugai Bey at his disposal.
At first, Khmelnitsky needed Tatar help and he was forced to accept it, although he knew very well that during the campaign nothing would stop the Tatars from robberies and violence. Even his son Timofey Khmelnitsky was forced to send the khan as a hostage, because without this khan Islam Giray III did not want to send his army. In addition, the presence of the Khan's troops at Khmelnytsky guaranteed him against the possibility of bribing the Tatars by Poland and striking in the rear.
By the end of April 1648, Khmelnytsky already had 10,000 troops at his disposal (including the Tatars), with whom he was preparing to move to the “volost”, rejecting all attempts at reconciliation that the Poles made to him.
First of all, he expelled the Polish detachment from Zaporozhye, and the Cossacks proclaimed him hetman and joined his army.
The news of the uprising and the capture of Zaporozhye by the rebels alarmed the Polish administration and it decided to nip the uprising in the bud. Pretending that they wanted to make peace with Khmelnitsky and promising him mountains of gold, the Poles quickly gathered their forces to fight him. And at this time, all of Ukraine, responding to the calls of Khmelnytsky, was preparing for the fight... The Polish hetman Pototsky wrote to the king: “the destructive flame flared up so much that there was no village, no city where calls for self-will did not sound and where would not prepare attempts on the life and property of their lords and owners.”
Crown Hetman N. Pototsky, without waiting for the concentration of all his forces, sent the vanguard to 4,000 under the command of his son Stefan, and ordered the registered Cossacks to sail down the Dnieper, in the Kodak area to meet with the Polish vanguard and move together to Zaporozhye. The main Polish forces, under the command of the crown hetman himself and his assistant, full hetman Kalinovsky, slowly advanced behind the vanguard.
Yellow Waters
Khmelnitsky did not wait for the union of all Polish forces. He came out to meet them and on April 19 attacked the advanced Polish units. The Poles could not stand the battle, retreated and built a fortified camp in the Zheltye Vody tract, so that they could wait for reinforcements from the registered Cossacks sailing along the Dnieper to join them. But the Cossacks rebelled, killed their elders, loyal to the Poles: General Yesaul Barabash, Colonel Karaimovich and others, and, choosing Khmelnytsky’s friend Filon Jalalia as their assigned hetman, joined not the Poles, but Khmelnytsky and took part in the battle that began, which ended completely defeat of the Poles. Stefan Pototsky and the registered Cossack commissar Shemberg, who was with him, were captured. Of the entire Polish army, only one soldier escaped, managing to escape and bring crown hetman Potocki in Cherkassy the news of the defeat at Zheltye Vody and the capture of his son.
Pototsky decided to “approximately punish the rebels” and, without doubting victory, moved towards Khmelnitsky, whose army (about 15,000 Cossacks and 4,000 Tatars) he met in the Gorokhovaya Dubrava tract near Korsun.
Korsun
Thanks to Khmelnitsky’s military talent and excellent reconnaissance of the rebels, with whom the population sympathized, the Poles were forced to take the fight in unfavorable positions, and the Cossacks cut off the possible retreat routes of the Poles in advance and made them impassable: they dug deep ditches, filled them with felled trees, and dammed the river. As a result, in the battle on May 16, the Cossacks, as at Zheltye Vody, completely defeated the Poles and captured the crown hetman Potocki himself and his deputy, full hetman Kalinovsky. Only a single participant in the Battle of Korsun, the Poles, managed to escape. All the Polish artillery and huge convoys went to the Cossacks as spoils of war. The Cossacks gave the captured Polish hetmans to the Tatars, who expected to receive a rich ransom for them.
News of the two defeats of the Poles quickly spread throughout Ukraine and, as the nobleman Bankovsky writes in his memoirs, “not a single nobleman remained on his estate in the Dnieper region.” Peasants and townspeople began to flock en masse to Khmelnytsky, or, forming partisan detachments, seize cities and castles with Polish garrisons.
Lithuanian Chancellor Radziwill describes the situation in Ukraine at the beginning of the summer of 1648: “not only the Cossacks rebelled, but all our subjects in Rus' pestered them and increased the Cossack troops to 70 thousand, and the further they went, the more they arrived. Russian claps"...
Cleansing the Left Bank
The largest magnate of the Left Bank, Vishnevetsky, having learned about the Khmelnitsky uprising, gathered a large army to move to help Pototsky pacify the uprising. But, approaching the Dnieper, he found all the ports destroyed and, not daring to linger on the Dnieper to cross his army, moved north to the Chernigov region and only north of Lyubech he managed to cross the Dnieper and lead his army to Volyn, where he arrived after the defeat near Zheltye Vody and Korsun. His residence, Lubny, was captured by the rebels, who massacred all the Catholics and Jews there who did not manage to leave in time with Vishnevetsky.
About Vishnevetsky’s retreat from the Left Bank, where he, being cut off from Poland by the Dnieper, felt, according to the memoirs of a contemporary, “like in a cage,” many documents have been preserved, from which it is clear that this was not only a retreat of the army, but also the evacuation of the entire Left Bank. Everything that was in one way or another connected with Poland and its social system was saved from the rebels and left with Vishnevetsky: the gentry, Jewish tenants, Catholics, Uniates. They knew that if they fell into the hands of the rebels, they would have no mercy.
In very detail, in a colorful biblical style, a contemporary of the events, Rabbi Hannover, describes this “exodus” of Jews from the Left Bank together with the Poles, who treated the Jews very well and in every possible way protected and protected them so that they would not fall into the hands of the Cossacks.
About the fate of those who did not have time to join Vishnevetsky, Hannover writes: “many communities that lay beyond the Dnieper, near the places of war, like Pereyaslav, Baryshevka, Piryatin, Lubny, Lokhvitsa, did not have time to escape and were destroyed in the name of God and died among terrible and bitter torment. Some were skinned and their bodies thrown out to be devoured by dogs; others had their arms and legs cut off, and their bodies thrown onto the road, where carts passed through them and horses trampled them...
They did no differently with the Poles, especially with the priests. They killed thousands of Jewish souls on the Trans-Dnieper...
The information given by Hanover completely coincides with the descriptions of events by other contemporaries, who also give the number of deaths. Grushevsky in his book “Khmelnytskyi in Rozkviti” speaks of two thousand Jews killed in Chernigov, 800 in Gomel, several hundred in Sosnitsa, Baturyn, Nosovka and other cities and towns. A description given by Grushevsky has also been preserved of how these pogroms were carried out: “some were chopped up, others were ordered to dig holes, and then Jewish wives and children were thrown there and covered with earth, and then the Jews were given muskets and some were ordered to kill others.”...
As a result of this spontaneous pogrom, on the Left Bank in a few weeks in the summer of 1648, all Poles, Jews, Catholics, as well as those of the small Orthodox gentry who sympathized with the Poles and collaborated with them, disappeared.
And the people composed a song that survived until recently:
“It’s not much better than what we have in Ukraine
Nema Lyakha, Nema Pan, dumb Jew
There is no damned union”...
Of the Orthodox gentry, the only survivors were those who joined the uprising, forgetting (albeit temporarily) both about their estates and rights over the “khlopas,” or those who fled and took refuge in Kiev, the only one of the cities of the Dnieper region where at that time the the power of the king.
One of these, who took refuge in Kyiv, an Orthodox nobleman and an ardent supporter of Poland, Erlich, left the most interesting descriptions of the events of that time. In particular, he describes in detail the uprising of the residents of Kyiv, during which everything in Kyiv that was somehow related to Poland was cut out and churches and Catholic monasteries were destroyed. The only survivors were those who hid in Orthodox monasteries or were part of the Polish Kyiv garrison, which, although it could not suppress the uprising, was still not captured by the rebels led by the Kyiv tradesman Polegenky.
Organization of power
On the Right Bank, mainly in the Dnieper regions, the same thing happened as on the Left Bank. As a result of this, a vast region was left without an administration and the only force and authority in it was the rebel army led by Khmelnitsky.
Taking this into account, Khmelnitsky immediately began creating his own military-administrative apparatus. The Hetman had the highest military, judicial and administrative power throughout the entire territory liberated from the Poles, which was divided into “regiments”. A “regiment” was a name given to a certain territory, which, in turn, was divided into “hundreds.”
Under the hetman there was an advisory “rada” (council) of the highest Cossack elders: a general judge, a general convoy (chief of artillery), a general podskarbiy (in charge of finances), a general clerk (administrative and political affairs), two general esauls (direct assistants to the hetman), General Bunchuzhy (keeper of the bunchuk) and General Cornet (keeper of the banner).
The regiment was governed by a colonel chosen by the Cossacks of a given regiment with a regimental captain, a judge, a clerk, a cornet and a baggage carrier, who were also chosen by the Cossacks.
The hundred was governed by an elected centurion with a hundred foreman: esaul, clerk, cornet, baggage officer.
In cities, both regimental and centenary, there was an elected city ataman - a representative of the Cossack administration who managed all the affairs of the city, and in addition there was city self-government - magistrates and town halls, consisting of elected representatives of the city population.
The villages, which usually had a mixed composition of peasants and Cossacks, had their own rural self-government, separately for peasants and separately for Cossacks. The peasants chose “voit”, and the Cossacks “ataman”.
It is curious that this separate self-government of peasants and Cossacks in the villages of Left Bank Ukraine survived until the revolution of 1917, although the titles of “voit” and “ataman” were replaced by “elders”. But there were separate elders: for the Cossacks - Cossack, for peasants - peasant.
Having thus organized the apparatus of power in the liberated territory, Khmelnitsky, in especially important cases, assembled a “broad elder council,” in which, in addition to the general foreman, colonels and centurions also took part. The archives preserve data on the convening of such councils in 1649, 1653 and 1654.
Carrying out his administrative organizational activities, Khmelnitsky was well aware that the struggle was not over yet, but was just beginning. Therefore, he feverishly prepared for its continuation, gathered forces and created a disciplined army from them. It was difficult to count on Moscow's immediate open intervention. The Tatars were both unreliable and unwanted allies: they could change at any time, and besides, they invariably engaged in robbery and violence even when they came as allies.
Poland did not waste time either. Having somewhat recovered from the defeats at Zheltye Vody and Korsun, she began to gather her forces to suppress the uprising.
At this time in Poland, after the death of King Władysław, there was a period of kinglessness and the Polish gentry were completely absorbed in the election struggle. But, despite this, the Poles still gathered a 40,000-strong army, which moved from Poland to Volyn, where Vishnevetsky, who had fled from the Left Bank, joined him with his army.
A collective leadership was placed at the head of the army - a triumvirate consisting of Polish magnates: the pampered, fat Prince Zaslavsky, the scribe and scholar Ostrorog and the 19-year-old Prince Koniecpolsky. Khmelnitsky ironically said about this triumvirate that “Zaslavsky is a feather bed, Ostrorog is a Latina, and Konetspolsky is a child” (child).
At the beginning of September, this army, with numerous convoys and servants, appeared in Volyn. The Poles went on this campaign as if it were a pleasure ride, confident in advance of an easy victory over the “rebellious slaves,” as they called the rebels.
Khmelnitsky marched towards them from Chigirin, where he had spent the summer months working feverishly to create an administrative apparatus and an army. A detachment of Tatars was with him.
Pilyavsky defeat
Under the small castle of Pilyavka (near the upper Bug), both armies came into contact and a battle began, which ended on September 13 with the complete defeat of the Poles. The scattered remnants of the Polish army, abandoning all artillery and convoys, fled in the direction of Lvov. Zaslavsky lost his mace, which went to the Cossacks, and Konetspolsky escaped by disguised as a peasant boy. The Poles ran the long route from Pilyavtsy to Lvov in 43 hours, according to the chronicler, “faster than the fastest walkers and entrusting their lives to their feet.” The fugitives did not stay long in Lvov. They collected as much money and valuables as possible from monasteries, churches and townspeople “to pacify the riot” and moved on to Zamosc.
Khmelnitsky's army moved slowly behind the fleeing Poles. Having approached Lvov, which had a Polish garrison, Khmelnitsky did not take Lvov, which he could have taken without difficulty, but limited himself to imposing a large indemnity (ransom) and moved further to Zamosc.
The mood in Poland after the Pilyavitsky defeat was close to panic. The chronicler Grabinka describes these sentiments as follows: “if many Poles gathered in Warsaw, all of them with rabbit ears, because their fear of Khmelnitsky was hurt, as soon as they heard the crackling of a dry tree, then without a soul I ran to Gdansk and through a dream more than one river: “ from Khmelnitsky!”
New King Jan-Kazimir
At this time, a new king, Jan Casimir, brother of the deceased Vladislav, was elected. The new king (a Jesuit bishop before his election as king), taking into account the situation, began to make attempts to reach an agreement with Khmelnitsky, promising the Cossacks various favors and privileges and acted as their defender against the willfulness of the magnates and gentry. He subtly played on the fact that the entire uprising flared up because of this self-will and was directed not against the king, but against the magnates and gentry. This is how the emissaries sent to him by the king convinced Khmelnitsky and the foreman.
Khmelnitsky received and listened to the emissaries and assured them that the rebels had nothing against the king personally and that the possibility of an agreement was not excluded. And he and his army, slowly, moved towards Zamosc, where Polish troops were concentrated and fortifications created by the Poles.
Siege of Zamosc
Having besieged Zamosc with the Poles in it, Khmelnitsky was in no hurry to start a battle, although he had all the data to repeat in Zamosc Pilyawica and move on to finish off the Poles in Poland itself, where outbreaks of peasant uprisings against landlord oppression had already begun. Galicia and Belarus also began to rise, and rebel detachments were already operating there, which the Poles contemptuously called “gangs.” However, Khmelnitsky did not take advantage of the situation, after several weeks he lifted the siege of Zamosc, and, leaving garrisons in Volyn and Podolia, returned to the Dnieper region.
Kyiv celebrations
In December 1648, Khmelnytsky’s ceremonial entry into Kyiv took place. The Jerusalem Patriarch Paisios, who was then in Kyiv, and the Kyiv Metropolitan Sylvester Kosov, rode out to meet him, accompanied by 1000 horsemen. A series of celebrations took place at which Khmelnitsky was glorified as a fighter for Orthodoxy, students of the Kyiv College (founded by Peter Mogila), verses were read in Latin in honor of Khmelnitsky, bells were rung in all churches, and cannons were fired. Even Metropolitan Sylvester, an ardent supporter of the magnates and a hater of the rebels, made a big speech praising the rebels and Khmelnitsky. The mood of the masses was so definitely on the side of the rebels that the Metropolitan did not dare not only speak out against them, but even refrain from speaking.
The people then all over Rus'-Ukraine sang a new song, how “the Cossacks drove Lyashka Slava pid lava” (bench), called all the Poles “leeches” and unshakably believed in the final overthrow of the Polish yoke and in reunification with Moscow of the same faith.
Without staying long in Kyiv, Khmelnitsky left for Pereyaslav and throughout the winter of 48-49 he was engaged in administrative and military affairs, having contact with both Poland and Moscow. From the first, ambassadors came to him and persuaded him to make peace; Khmelnitsky sent letters and ambassadors to Moscow asking for help and consent to the reunification of Ukraine-Rus with Moscow.
The Khmelnitsky uprising is an armed Cossack-peasant uprising in the Western Russian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the subsequent people's national liberation war of the Orthodox population against the power of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Polish magnates and their supporters.
The uprising was led by the hetman of the grassroots Zaporozhye Cossacks and colonel of the Zaporozhye Army Bogdan Khmelnytsky.
Starting with a revolt of the Cossacks of the Zaporozhye Sich, it was soon supported in Left-Bank and Right-Bank Ukraine, White Rus', Volyn and Podolia.
The Crimean Tatars also took an active part in the uprising, who either supported Bogdan Khmelnitsky or sided with the Poles.
The war between the Cossacks and the Polish crown was accompanied by varying success; it included both outstanding victories and devastating defeats.
After the conclusion of the Pereyaslav Treaty in 1654 and the voluntary transfer of the Hetmanate to the citizenship of the Russian Empire, the uprising escalated into the Russian-Polish War of 1654 - 1667.
The reason for the uprising was the strengthening of the political influence of the “gentry oligarchy” and feudal exploitation by Polish magnates. Church union and subordination of the church to the Roman throne was accepted.
The reason for the uprising was magnate lawlessness. The Subotov farmstead was taken away from the registered colonel of the Zaporozhye Army Bogdan Khmelnitsky, the farm was ruined, his ten-year-old son was pinned to death and the woman with whom he lived after the death of his wife was taken away.
Khmelnitsky began to look for courts and justice for these atrocities, but did not find them; the Polish judges did not find any grounds for this. And then Bohdan Khmelnitsky, as an instigator, was thrown into prison. His friends freed him. After his liberation, Bohdan Khmelnytsky went to Niz (the islands below the Zaporozhye Sich, which were then under Polish control). There he quickly gathered a detachment of hunters to settle scores with the Poles. With their help, Bogdan Khmelnitsky raised the Cossacks of the entire Sich.
On October 1, 1653, a Zemsky Sobor was held in Moscow, at which it was decided to accept Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky and the entire Zaporozhye Army with cities and lands into Russian citizenship.
On December 19, the Russian ambassador Vasily Buturin arrived in Ukraine with the decision of the Zemsky Council to accept Bogdan Khmelnitsky and the entire Zaporozhye Army with cities and lands into Russian citizenship.
On January 8, 1654, the Pereyaslav Rada was convened, after which the Cossacks took an oath to the tsar. On behalf of the Tsar, the hetman was presented with a letter and signs of the hetman's power: a banner, a mace and a hat.
The unification of Ukraine and Russia became the main condition for the creation of the Russian Empire.