who was later to be the celebrated Patriarch of Constantinople, taught
at Ostrih and Wilno for a few years and he was perhaps the most
prominent of the teachers to arrive. Yet even his short stay shows the
desperate straits to which Constantinople was reduced at the time,
when it seemed as if Greek learning itself might vanish as had the old
splendor of Kievan culture.
It is only fair, however, to say that the Polish schools were
themselves none too efficient. The ideas of Protestantism had spread
widely throughout Poland during this period and at one time a
considerable proportion of the great magnates were at least sympathetic
to it. The movement was checked by the work of the Order of the
Jesuits and especially by its greatest member, Peter Skarga, probably
the keenest mind of the day in Poland. He worked vigorously as a
propagandist for the unity of the Churches and also as a founder and
administrator of the various schools. The curriculum in these, while
broader than the average Greek schools, was still not satisfactory from
the European standpoint of the day. They were heavily laden with a late
form of scholasticism and this in turn exerted a certain influence upon
the Orthodox schools which had to prepare their students to live in the
Polish atmosphere.
The first of the great Ukrainian schools was that of Ostrih. Here
Prince Konstantin Ostrozky, one of the richest nobles who still adhered
to the Orthodox faith, set up a school. He invited Greeks to serve on
its staff. He bought a printing press. Through his friendship with
Prince Andrey Kurbsky, who fled from Moscow, he was fully acquainted
with the work that had been done at Novgorod a half century earlier
by Archbishop Gennady at the time of the heresy of the Judaizers.
Prince Ostrozky’s powerful position enabled him to secure a copy of
the Bible prepared by Gennady, parts of which had been translated from
the Latin Vulgate. This Bible was again revised at Ostrih and was
published in 1580 as the Ostrih Bible, the first Bible published in
any East Slavonic land. The school flourished for about twenty years
until the death of Konstantin. His sons accepted the Roman Catholic
faith and very soon lost all interest in the work that their father had
undertaken, with bad results to the school.
At Lviv, the work was under the Lviv Staropegian Brotherhood. This
was the most important of the various brotherhoods that had been
established years before in the various Ukrainian towns. These were
in the nature of the mediaeval guilds but they were also largely
concerned with the care of the poor and orphans. Membership in them was
restricted to the Orthodox and they represented the more substantial
portions of the merchant classes of the various cities. With the
increasing realization of the need for education and for the defence
of the Orthodox Faith, these brotherhoods voluntarily gave up part of
their philanthropic and social activities and devoted themselves to the
newer and more pressing needs.
Their school was established in 1586, a few years later than that in
Ostrih, but it was really on a firmer foundation because it could
not be so severely affected by the defection of a single patron. It
maintained high rank in Greek and Church Slavonic. At the various
exercises the pupils were able to write and present Greek speeches and
translations and some of them went to Mount Athos to continue their
studies or to remain there as monks. Yet it was forced also to include
a knowledge of Latin and the various writings of the school show that
it had come under the influence of the Polish panegyric style of the
day.
The third centre of the national revival was Kiev, which had shrunken
sadly in importance under the many sacks which it had undergone. The
Monastery of the Caves was reorganized to undertake serious educational
work and the brotherhood of the city also opened its own school. These
were later combined into the Kiev Academy of Peter Mohyla, a talented
Moldavian who became the Metropolitan of Kiev in 1632 after having
been for five years Archimandrite of the Monastery of the Caves. The
Kiev Academy, which was later able to found branches in various other
cities, became the outstanding institution in the Ukraine and the
entire Eastern Slav area. The catechism prepared by Mohyla was accepted
by a council held under the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1643 as the
standard for all the Slav-speaking Orthodox and this proved a great
triumph for Ukrainian and Kievan scholarship, since it gave the Academy
a standing far outside the area from which it drew its students.
The beneficent results of this system of education would have been far
greater, had events not made Ukraine the battleground for the renewal
of the struggle between Rome and Constantinople. Although the Greek
Church, after the fall of Constantinople, had repudiated the Union
of Florence and the various negotiations between the Papacy and the
Byzantine Empire, the results were left in Europe. Many of the Greeks
who had signed the Union remained in high position in Rome and they
left behind them their ideas, their hopes and aspirations.
It was easy to see why advocates of such a policy could hope for
success among the Ukrainians in Poland. Over a period of years many
of the leading nobles had been Polonized, but they still retained all
their former rights in making Church appointments, rights little more
extensive than those possessed by the Roman Catholic nobles. Why should
they not exercise these rights and place Roman Catholic sympathizers in
responsible positions? Similarly the King of Poland assumed the various
rights of the older Orthodox princes who had been expelled from their
lands at the period of conquest.
In the minds of the thinkers of the sixteenth century, such actions
were not only moral and consistent but necessary. It suited the
religious and political leaders of the century and it was powerfully
reinforced by the efforts of the Jesuits. More and more the Kings and
the magnates put pressure upon the Orthodox bishops. They even went
so far in the early part of the century as to require heavy payments
from the Orthodox before they would consent to the appointment of a new
Orthodox bishop even for Lviv.
At the same time every change in the constitution of Poland tended to
increase the power of the lords and to decrease those of the peasants
and the townspeople. The peasants saw themselves forced to harder and
harder conditions of living, until they became practically serfs,
living on the land of their masters and liable for more and more unpaid
labor. The townspeople gradually lost most of their privileges. They
were forbidden to buy land, if they were Ukrainians, outside of certain
Ukrainian quarters, and the flourishing trade that had been built up
fell to almost nothing. The Polish townspeople were little better off
and the general history of the towns during the century was one of
uninterrupted decay. Yet for the Poles religion was not impaired, since
their clergy were influential in the state. For the Ukrainians, with
the loss of their aristocracy, the diminution of their privileges left
them without any defenders.
What was needed was a reorganization of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church
but this was difficult. Many of the higher ecclesiastics, bishops
and heads of monasteries, were hardly willing to give up their own
practical independence. At the same time the brotherhoods, who were the
best organized and most intelligently conscious members of the Orthodox
Church, sought for ways to make their influence felt, and as their
school system grew, so did their claims and their potentialities.
To add to the confusion, just at this moment there began to appear in
Ukraine various of the Eastern patriarchs. These men, zealously trying
to uphold their ancient privileges, were travelling not so much for the
sake of supervising the various sees that were nominally under their
control as for collecting alms and funds to help the Church in the
Ottoman Empire. Yet they could not resist the temptation to act as the
former Patriarchs who were something more than beggars and who had at
their disposal abundant resources.
Moscow was usually their goal. It was far easier to receive enormous
funds there than from the poor peasants of Ukraine. It was not without
significance that in 1589 the Patriarch Jeremias on one of these visits
was induced by copious gifts for his suffering flock to consecrate a
Patriarch for Moscow and to grant to the Church of Moscow the right
to choose and consecrate its own Patriarch thereafter. It was the
culmination of the dream of Moscow to become the Third Rome.
That same Jeremias, while in Ukraine, and conscious of the sufferings
and disorder of the Orthodox Church, carelessly approved an agreement
that had been made a few years earlier between the Patriarch Joachim of
Antioch and the brotherhood of Lviv. This agreement had conferred upon
the brotherhood the right of supervision of the clergy and of reporting
delinquent priests to the bishop who was to be himself liable to
condemnation, if he refused to remedy the abuse complained of. It was
a more than foolish proposal, for it meant a complete reversal of the
traditional Orthodox method of church administration and intensified
the friction between the higher classes who were usually of the gentry
and the townsmen and the peasants who ranked lower in the social scale
of the day.
Sooner or later it was certain to promote a clash in the Ukrainian
Orthodox Church which could be of profit to no one except its foes.
Further attempts by the Patriarch to extend his control over the
Ukrainian Church were equally resented by both clergy and laity. The
fact was that with the state of irritation and frustration that existed
in the land almost any action that was designed to tighten up the
administration, as had been done by the Jesuits in the Roman Catholic
Church, would have aroused anger and increased the confusion. The
higher clergy were jealous of the brotherhoods and despised them as
plebeian. The brotherhoods were suspicious of the bishops and regarded
them as false to their duties.
It is very possible that there was lurking in all this elements of
Protestant propaganda from Bohemia. It is certain that the Jesuits
were not in the slightest degree averse to fanning hostility among the
Orthodox and that the King and the Polish magnates were willing to
do anything to break up the solid front that had existed among the
Orthodox.
At all events a fight soon broke out between Gedeon Balaban, the Bishop
of Lviv, and the brotherhood. As a result of this, Balaban conferred
with the other bishops and a decision was made to place themselves
under the Pope. The clergy and the nobles who took part in these
discussions realized the danger to the nation from the policy of the
Poles and the growing power of Moscow and hoped for at least moral
support from the Papacy and the West. Negotiations went on rapidly in
secret, for the bishops knew that a large part of their congregations
would decline to follow them. In 1595, two of them, Terletsky and Poty,
went to Rome and formally signed an agreement with the Pope, promising
submission.
The next year, 1596, the King of Poland called a public council of the
Orthodox Church at Brest to confirm the Union. The result was hardly
to his liking, for two of the bishops, Balaban who had initiated the
movement and Kopistinsky, Bishop of Peremyshl, declined to ratify it.
Despite the efforts of the Polish government, the Patriarchal Vicar
Nicephorus appeared at the gathering with other Byzantine officials.
More important than that, the remaining Orthodox lords, including
Prince Ostrozky, came in protest and there were representatives of the
brotherhoods and the lesser Orthodox gentry and townsmen.
Thus the lines of battle were clearly drawn between the King, the
Polish magnates, the Roman Catholic clergy and the bishops who had
agreed to the Union and all other classes of the population. What
had been intended as a peace meeting, as the formal ratification of
something that had been decided upon, ended with ill concealed discord.
The Orthodox refused to enter the cathedral because the bishop of
the diocese had signed the Act of Union. The Uniats and the Roman
Catholics declined to attend the Orthodox meeting presided over by the
Patriarchal Vicar. A few days were spent in meaningless invitations to
the opposing party and finally there were duly formed two councils, one
of the Uniats and Roman Catholics, the other of the Orthodox. Each of
these duly anathematized and deposed the bishops of the other faction
and appealed to the King to carry out their wishes as representatives
of the real desires of the Church and people.
It was abundantly evident that in this controversy the actual power
lay in the hands of the King and the Uniats. King Sigismund, of the
Catholic branch of the Vasa line of Sweden, had no intention of giving
any rights to the Orthodox and his followers controlled the organs of
the state. The Orthodox could do little but argue, write and talk and
that seemed little enough. With the control of the state on their side,
the Uniats felt that they could overlook the many polemical pamphlets
that were hurled against them, especially by Ivan Vyshensky, the most
celebrated of the defenders of Orthodoxy. Vyshensky was a monk who
had studied at Mount Athos. He was a conservative in the educational
disputes and felt that the modern schools were not severely Orthodox
enough, not enough critical of the modern Western learning; but when
it came to the dispute over the Union, he stood firmly with the
brotherhoods. His pamphlets, written with bitter invective against the
Uniats, had a telling effect.
The King and his lords paid no attention. They were sure of an ultimate
victory and set about acting accordingly. They commenced to dispossess
by force those of the bishops and priests who refused to accept the
Union and on the death of the Metropolitan of Kiev, Rohoza, in 1590,
they appointed as the new Metropolitan Poty, who was the violent
advocate of the Union. Poty kept urging the King and the government to
further acts of aggression against the Orthodox and his arguments fell
upon willing ears.
Yet it was a long distance between talk and realization. The Orthodox
fought zealously in defence of their rights, as they considered them,
although it was evident that they were fighting a losing battle. The
number of influential lords on their side and in the Polish senate
was steadily decreasing as more and more of them became Polonized and
joined the Roman Catholic Church. Even a promise of the King in 1597,
forced by the foreign situation, that he would appoint only Orthodox
to the Orthodox sees and parishes remained a dead letter, for the
King did not feel himself bound by any promise to the heretics or the
dissidents, as they were now called in Polish official language.
The reaction varied in the different provinces. In Lviv and Peremyshl
where there were still Orthodox bishops, even though the influence
of Polish landlords was strong, there was some relief. In those
dioceses where the Catholic landlords joined with the Uniat bishops
the situation was worse. In some others, as Kiev, where there still
remained a considerable number of Orthodox landlords, there was a still
different situation and in Kiev particularly, Prince Vasil Konstantin
Ostrozky as governor of the province openly disobeyed the orders of the
king.
Yet all this was temporary. Time was clearly playing on the side of
the Catholics and the Uniats. Sooner or later it was certain that
there would come a moment when the Orthodox opposition would become
negligible, when the Orthodox lords would cease to have the power
to defend their coreligionists in the Polish government or on their
estates, when the brotherhoods could be broken up or suppressed or won
over. Steps were already taken in Wilno to expel the Orthodox from the
Churches despite the pleas of the vast majority of the population.
There was only one factor that might interfere. It had already appeared
as a dark shadow when the King endeavored to seize the Monastery of the
Caves at Kiev. That was the appearance of an armed band of Nalyvaykans,
as they were called, within the walls of the monastery, who were ready
to fight for the Orthodox Church. It was a grim portent and a warning,
had the King and his advisors been prepared to heed it, for these men
were a branch of the Kozaks of the Dnyeper valley and the Kozaks were
destined to bear in the future the burden of the struggle for Ukrainian
freedom.
CHAPTER FIVE
_THE KOZAKS_
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a brilliant and colorful
age, an age of high thinking and of great adventure. Not since the age
of the Vikings had men of courage and of determination dared so much
upon the high seas. The Spanish conquistadores settled the whole of
South America. They laid their hands upon the fabulous wealth of Mexico
and Peru. Well armed and fearless, a handful of Europeans dared to face
thousands of the Aztecs and the Incas and came off victorious in the
name of the Christian religion. The English in still smaller and more
manageable boats swarmed across the Atlantic Ocean and attacked the
rich and treasure-laden galleons wherever they found them and then,
early in the seventeenth century, they laid the foundations of their
colonies in America. Europe meanwhile was torn by religious wars,
as the new ideas of Protestantism sought to extend their sphere of
influence.
That same spirit and that same daring, that same zeal for the Faith
which they had received from their fathers, that same longing for
a freedom which they no longer had burst out in the east of Europe
and started the Kozaks on their historic mission. Where the Atlantic
seaboard saw men of courage and of action put out to sea in small and
scarcely seaworthy craft, in the east men of similar character swept
across the steppes, ready to fight and to sell their lives for liberty.
They formed a force that was difficult to control and impossible to
check. They revived the courage and the bravery of the early rulers of
Kiev and they left an imperishable mark upon their surroundings. The
Kozak Host became in a few years an object of terror and concern to
all of their neighbors, be they Poles, Muscovites, Turks, Tatars or
whoever else attempted to restrain their unbridled energy and to reduce
them to the status of serfs. It was an outpouring of the human spirit
that has scarcely been equalled at any time or in any region and the
Kozaks were praised or hated, according as they met with friend or foe.
The name Kozak is borrowed from the Turkish word meaning “free warrior”
and the meaning of the word amply expresses the dominant characteristic
of these people. They were in essence the frontiersmen of eastern
Europe, living in those areas where there was no law but the sword and
where no man could be called to account except by one who was stronger
than he. They reacted fiercely against every invasion of their rights
and in the beginning co-operated only for defence or attack.
The stories of the first Kozaks have much in common with the legends
of some of the American pioneers who crossed into Kentucky, the dark
and bloody ground, as it was known in the eighteenth century. There was
only the difference that the Kozaks were operating not in mountainous
and wooded territory but on the open plains and that their opponents
were not small bands of Indians, hardly more numerous than themselves,
but large masses of well-mounted troops eager for plunder and for slave
collecting.
The weakening of the Golden Horde and conflicts between the Khan and
the Sultan of Turkey had relaxed control over the black earth region
across the Dnyeper. In that no man’s land and along the Dnyeper
itself there was a rich area in which there were few or no permanent
residents. It offered an ideal place for men who had no fear of death
and who valued their personal liberty above everything else, to live a
lawless and carefree life without personal obligations. The prospect
appealed to many who were suffering under the oppressive rule of the
feudal lords in both Poland and Lithuania. Likewise men streamed out
of the Muscovite lands into the lower Don and the lower Volga areas.
Out of these groups of men there developed the Don Cossacks, who were
nominally subject to Moscow, and the Zaporozhian Kozaks, who were
originally required to pay some sort of allegiance to Poland.
We first hear of the Kozaks of the Dnyeper at the end of the fifteenth
century, when men from various sections of Rus’ went into the
wilderness which had already received the name of Ukraine and passed
their time hunting, collecting honey, and fishing. They did not disdain
any opportunity of plundering Tatar raiding detachments, caravans
crossing the country or messengers passing between the Sultan and the
Khan, and the Kings of Poland and of Lithuania. Very often they were
able to return to their homes at the approach of winter with rich
spoils which far outvalued the natural products even of a fabulously
rich land.
From these more or less accidental encounters, it was not long before
the little bands gathered together in larger groups and set out
deliberately to plunder their enemies. The frontier guards of Poland
and Lithuania tried to levy taxes on the booty which they brought back.
Then the obvious thing was not to return but to pass the winter in
small fortresses built beyond the settled frontier.
In the beginning men of every class who loved adventure joined in
these raids. There were gentry who craved adventure and excitement.
There were townspeople who were bored by the monotonous hardships of
declining trade. There were peasants who had suffered at the hands of
their landlords. There were men who innocently or for due cause were
sought by the authorities of the law. Yet when they once came into
this unsettled country, they realized that they had to work together.
Neither birth nor wealth nor training counted for anything except in so
far as it assisted a man in asserting his own power and in persuading
his comrades to work with him.
It was a free society in a free world. Gradually all the little
fortresses and hangouts felt the need for closer cooperation, and step
by step there was built up a rough organization which represented in
general all the various groups. If this was to be effective, it had
to have some sort of permanent headquarters and the ideal place was
finally found to be the islands below the rapids of the Dnyeper River.
Hence came the name Zaporozhe, the place below the rapids.
About 1552 one Prince Dmytro Vyshnevetsky, a gentleman Kozak, took
the initiative in building as this centre a fortress on the island
of Khortytsya, in this general region. This was the beginning of the
celebrated Sich which was to inspire terror in the hearts of all the
surrounding lands. Here the Kozaks could gather in relative security.
Here they could store the cannon which they captured on their various
raids, the booty which they acquired. Here they could meet for
deliberation and decide what enterprise they would next undertake.
The Kozaks of the Sich, eternally ready for battle or for raids, became
as it were a replica of the various orders of military knights that had
played such a role in the area of the Baltic Sea and in the crusades.
Here was a group of men ready to fight the battle for Christianity and
the Orthodox faith against the apparently invincible Mohammedans.