The lot of the Orthodox clergy and peasants of the Ukraine, separated by a gulf of fanaticism from their feudal Polish lords, was voiced in JNIorris Drecninski's protest to the King in the Polish Diet:*
"When your Majesty goes to war against the Turk who furnishes the greater part of your army? Russians practicing the Orthodox faith! How, then, can we be asked to sacrifice our lives abroad when at home there is no peace? Our miseries, the miseries of the Russian subjects of Poland, are
* Rambaud, op cit, p. 314.
patent to everyone. In the great cities seals close the doors of our churches and their holy treasuries are despoiled. In our monasteries the monks are driven forth and cattle stabled in their place. Our children are without baptism and their corpses are thrown out from the town like the bodies of dead animals. Men and women must live together without God's benediction given by a priest. Death is without confession or sacrament. Is not this an offence against God and will not God avenge us?"
Another grievance, even more galling to the Orthodox frontiersmen, was found in the behaviour of the Jew and German *'intendants" who usually acted as intermediaries between the Polish lords of the manor and the long-suffering population of their estates. These * 'unbelievers" were often given "control of the rights of hunting and fishing, the roads and wine shops" — even access to the Orthodox churches was to be obtained from them only by paying a fee.
The bitterest irony of the situation we have described lay in the fact that these burdens were laid by the aristocracy, not as in the rest of Europe, upon a grovelling population of serfs to whom their lords at least afforded protection, but upon a border nation of alien faith and blood who, following the policy of the Polish kings, possessed a system of martial preparedness and, indeed, were the principal protectors of the Polish frontiers.
The rampart against the Turks and Tartars,
BOGDAN: A COSSACK NATIONAL HERBO 73
formed by the Cossack settlements, had by tliirs time become fully organized. They formed no less than twenty regular Cossack polki or regiments, each under its own colonel, or polkovnik. The whole of this well disciplined army obej^ed the commands of a single military chief called the "Hetman of the Ukraine," who received his appointment from the King of Poland. In all his decisions this officer was guided by the advice of a starshina or council of the Cossack elders.
Besides the above troops, recruited from among the inhabitants of the Cossack settlements and the "slovods" or armed villages nearer the Tartar frontier, the warhke brotherhood of the Zaporogian Cossacks had now grown into a powerful military organization. Their stronghold — the sitch — formed a permanent camp or rendezvous beyond the rapids of the Dnieper. These warriors — famous in all Europe — represented the perfection, or rather the extreme, of devotion to the principles of free Cossack life. Their celebrated infantry were the only troops capable of withstanding the shock of Pohsh cavalry, the heavily armed liouzars or hussars of noble birth, and the less showy, but no less invincible dragoons.
In many places along the border the Cossacks had old-established settlements scattered among the serf -tilled lands belonging to the Polish and Lithuanian nobles. Often these homesteads, which the Cossacks had reclaimed from the steppes, were
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
cenaciously claimed through some shadowy feudal right by absentee Polish landlords. By the latter, the Free Cossacks and their institutions were of course considered a dangerous example to the docile Polish peasantry.
In order to discourage the growth of a class of Cossack proprietors, even the tolerant Polish king, Stephen Bathory, had tried to establish a register of "Free Cossacks" whose numbers were not to exceed six thousand. The surplus of the Cossacks — those not needed for purposes of border defense — were often forced to labor on the land of some feudal lord. It was concerning the coveted right of inscription upon this list of free men and upon grounds of religious oppression that the principal difference now arose which was to separate the Cossack nation from their allegiance to the kings of Poland. Long patient under wrongs, they felt the power to redress: the Cossacks of the Ukraine only awaited a hero to lead them in a war of rightful assertion and protest.