As in the previous two centuries, the flight or emigration of their serfs from the estates of the hoyars in the north had continued to excite the apprehension of the Russian nobles. During the opening years of the eighteenth century it was calculated that the call of liberty and free land had drawn nearly 30,000 serfs to the Cossack settlements of the Don. The Tsar, Peter the Great, whose far-reaching reforms did not contemplate any immediate amelioration of the lot of the peasants or the conditions of serfdom, now determined to send Prince Dolgorouki to force these fugitives to return. While the Cossacks of the Don at first formally submitted to the authority of the lem arising through the capture by his Cossacks of a Persian princess endowed with such surpassing beauty that her charms threatened to distract the attention of the bandit leader from his sanguinary duties, and even to sow discord among his entire troop. In order to remove this danger to his *'cause" Stenka consigned his too-fascinating spoil of the Orient to a watery grave, greatly to the satisfaction of his followers and the enhancement of his own popular reputation.
Tsar's envoy, they privately determined in solemn comicil to support the new companions who had thus loyally sought their protection. Dolgorouki at first met with little opposition. During his return journey, however, while encumbered with troops of captives, he was led into a Cossack ambush where the peasants were released and his army all but destroyed. The fact that a leader in this assault, a Cossack named Boula\"in, was subsequently elected hetman, added a fresh provocation to the previous conduct of the Don Cossacks.
The result of these events was not long awaited. Peter, realizing that any weakness he might show in meeting the situation might end in a general revolt of the provinces of the Ukraine, sent another Prince Dolgorouki with fresh troops to revenge his kinsman upon the inhabitants of the "turbulent provinces of the Don."
"The principal mutineers," wrote this officer a few months later in a grim report addressed to the Emperor, "have been hanged. Of their companions one in every ten have been hanged; all of those I have had hanged were placed upon gibbets, which I erected on the rafts and set afloat, so that along the whole course of the river they might serve as an example."*
After the sanguinary hint offered to the Cossacks of the Don, the Tsar was able to introduce his favourite methods of military administration
* Rambaud, "Histoire de Russie," page 300.
Ttinong the "settlements" or slovods of the Don without further armed resistance. But the discontent aroused by these innovations was deep and implacable.
In considering the "treason" of Mazeppa and the course adopted by his fellow conspirators during the important events about to be narrated, the unpopularity of these reforms, which infringed some of the most cherished privileges assured by the Tsar's predecessors to the population of the Ukraine, must first be taken into account.
The historians of this period have generally been too deeply in sympathy with the reforming policies of Peter the Great to do full justice to the Cossack cause. The actions of Mazeppa and his Cossack followers are only accounted perfidious obstacles in the pathway of Russia's progress towards unification. There is nothing, however, in the history of this fateful struggle, wherein the defeat of a couple of mutinous regiments of Cossacks and a few thousand exhausted Swedish veterans actually decided the balance of power in the north — to show that Mazeppa acted otherwise than as a disinterested upholder of the rights and national privileges of his adopted comrades in arms.
Consideration of the part played by the Cossacks in the winter campaign of Poltava, throws an important light on the military history of Charles XII. Even the "Madman of the North," in spite of his over-confident (not to say vain-glorious)
methods of strategy, would never have permitted his army to be drawn so far from its base of supplies unless the assurance of Mazeppa had led him to suppose that a discontented "Free Ukraine" party were ready to welcome him as a deliverer.
CHAPTER VI
TO have held for an instant the balance of power in the momentous struggle which fixed the supremacy of Russia among the "Powers of the North"; to lose by narrowest chance a great place in history; to be remembered only as the hero of a romantic poem; the central figure of a popular opera, — such has been the strange fate of the Cossack hetman Mazeppa! *